4-core slow due to disk access

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Lucio M Nicolosi <lmnicolosi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:
>> I have in Karmic (2-6.31-20) a nasty problem for which I cannot find a
>> solution.
>> My system: AMD Phenom II 4 -core 4 GB of memory, 1 HD 250 GB and 2
>> external USB disks (resp 250GB and 1 TB), which are irrelevant for the
>> problem. I have an 8 GB swap-space.
>> After starting the system it's speed is acceptable but not superfast. I
>> have e few applications running (terminal, Thunderbird, Firefox and
>> gkrellm). I see in gkrellm that I have now 2 GB free and and ~ 1 GB of
>> swap-space in use.
>> Normally I have vmware running with Windows XP but I have that
>> temporarily closed.
>> I can see that I use from 1-5 % processortime (over 4 cores), 7 users (I
>> have a few terminals started) and 447 processes.
>> But when I start a program it takes even > 1q second to start calculator
>> and switching folders in Thunderbird, takes sometimes minutes.
>> In the gkrellm monitor I see a constant disk use for what?? (I have 2 Gb
>> free). I cannot imagine that the system is constantly swapping.
>> I have this problem since I started the system (Aug-09) and the slowing
>> progresses over time so I need to restart at least every 10 days,
>> Has anybody ideas and will it be better with 10.4 LTS?
>> Joep
>
> My (legacy) Athon 64 X2 2400 (Karmic/Lucid 64) uses right at this
> moment around 700 Mb (of its 4 Gb) for
> compiz/firefox/empathy/evolution/skype/synaptic and gkrellm and no
> swap at all (346 processes - 1 terminal). Perhaps your 7 open
> terminals are responsible for the difference? Perhaps you simply do
> not have enough memory to run all these terminals with just 4 Gb ram,
> thus the need to swap 2 Gb?

No. 7 terminals would only use a few dozen meg of RAM. I have a 4GB
machine as well, although only a dual core, and my machine almost
never uses any swap at all.

Also, I have not tweaked the setup & am on the orginal "swappiness".

Question for the OP: are you running 32-bit or 64-bit? If it's 32-bit
then you won't be able to access a lot of your memory. 32-bit
operating systems on the PC can only access about 3-3.25GB of RAM.


-- 
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