4-core slow due to disk access

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:
> 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).


Joep,

There are reports of memory leakage with Firefox.You should check the
amount of memory used by each application when the system begins to
get slower (system monitor or top or atop). If Firefox is using more
than, say, 250 Mb, it is probably "leaking", and should be restarted
or even upgraded to a newer release.

Also, I found a reference of degraded performance when a
multi-frequency processor is running with the "powersave" tag. Just in
case, if not already, please enable the CPU frequency monitor on Panel
and set it to "performance" or "on demand".

At this moment, other than that, I can only imagine that you are *the*
power user.

L.


-- 
L M Nicolosi, Eng.
Lat.:  23°34'4.79"S - Long.: 46°39'59.53"W
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