4-core slow due to disk access

[Joep L. Blom]

Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>

Lucio,
Thanks for the reply.
I agree however with Liam: terminals don't use a lot of memory.
Liam: I use 64-bit (the Phenom II is 64 bit 4-core) and I also haven't 
tweaked the "swapiness". I think that with 4 GB and the modest load 
swapping shouldn't be necessary. Moreover the fact when the system is a 
little bit heavier loaded, it takes sometimes more than 20 seconds for 
simple things like starting a program and the disk light is continuously 
on, moreover, delays increase when the time between restarts increases.
CLifford: the culprits may well be firefox and thunderbird, which I both 
use continuously. In firefox I have ~ 25 windows open some with flash 
(at least flash is installed).
Rashkae: no I don't think that VMware reserves so much swap-space as at 
the moment is in use, although some vmware related processes are still 
running.
My outputs are:
~$ free
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3992748    2895328    1097420          0      50168     847436
-/+ buffers/cache:    1997724    1995024
Swap:      8193108     889160    7303948

and:
~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        3992748 kB
MemFree:         1082844 kB
Buffers:           50528 kB
Cached:           860604 kB
SwapCached:       206116 kB
Active:          1412920 kB
Inactive:         724464 kB
Active(anon):     954288 kB
Inactive(anon):   279156 kB
Active(file):     458632 kB
Inactive(file):   445308 kB
Unevictable:           8 kB
Mlocked:               8 kB
SwapTotal:       8193108 kB
SwapFree:        7304344 kB
Dirty:              3676 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:       1122800 kB
Mapped:            82620 kB
Slab:              89120 kB
SReclaimable:      42124 kB
SUnreclaim:        46996 kB
PageTables:        40536 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:    10189480 kB
Committed_AS:    3019596 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      317396 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359418363 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:     2741824 kB
DirectMap2M:     1386496 kB
DirectMap1G:           0 kB

Sorry for the long mail but then all info is there.
Joep