What is hammering my memory?

[Joep L. Blom]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 2 July 2010 19:41, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
>> Is it GTK apps? KDE apps calling GTK apps/dialogs? Switching desktop
>> spaces or windows?
>>
> 
> The only GTK app I've opened is Firefox, but the system is sluggish
> from the minute I get a desktop. I can open a text editor (kate) and a
> Konsole window, and Alt-Tabbing between them is sluggish. Typing in
> either is sluggish as well.
> 
> 
>> Those could be caused by dbus troubles or other stuff and they are hard
>> to track down. Right now, I have a problem with sudo. It works not too
>> long after start up but afterwards, it stops working. All I can say is,
>> all these random problems are making me more and more inclined to run
>> something else other than Ubuntu.
>>
> 
> Well, to be fair I am talking about the 10.10 alpha2 (I did mention
> that in the OP). I don't expect it to work! But I'd like to find the
> bug so that I can report it and it can be fixed.
> 
> 
Dotan,
A few days ago I mentioned the same problem and I still have it.
I have swappiness set to 0 but the system is sluggish.
One of the memory hogs is vmware (with one host) but the slugginess is 
caused, in my opinion by disk I/O as I see the disk light litting up 
even when I type (not always).
Because of the memory problems with firefox I have temporarily chrome as 
my browser. Not bad but must still learn a lot. I don't think therfore 
that it is distribution bound: I still use Karmic as I don't trust Lucid.
one suggestion: I have gkrellm running so I can always see the top most 
active processes.
Joep