slow karmic system

[Joep L. Blom]

NoOp wrote:
> On 06/28/2010 11:46 AM, Joep L. Blom wrote:
> ...
>> After a reboot, the system is much quicker and "alerter" but after a few 
>> days (the system is now > 5 days up) it slows.
>> I've read somewhere that there is something like a "swappiness" factor 
>> that can be set but I have no idea what that means and I would very much 
>> understand what I do as I don't like to follow recipes without knowing 
>> the rationale.
>> Hope somebody can give me some clues.
>> Joep
>>
> 
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
> 
> But it sounds to me like you have an app that has a memory leak. I'd run
> top or htop in a terminal over the 5 days and monitor your memory usage.
> 
> 
> 
Garry,
As usual your suggestions are invaluable!
I looked in the link you gave and found there a little script to empty 
your swap and bring it all in memory. The amazing thing is  that using 
that script my free memory goes to 50 % and my free swap space is 100 %.
The system is quick. The only thing is the eventual memory leakage. I 
will not yet run ntop or htop continuously as it takes gives an overhead 
and it is more useful - in my eyes - to use free and record its output 
over a longer time. That gives you memory 'snapshots' and it can easily 
be implemented in a cron job.
After I started VMware player free memory drops to 25 % and Free swap 
drops to 99 %. I will see if that is the process with memory leaks.
But thanks very much for the link,
Joep