Excess processes

[John R. Sowden]

On 05/16/2013 09:48 AM, J wrote:
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:23 PM, John R. Sowden
> <jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:
>> I just noticed a lot of hd thrashing while was looking at a web page with tb
>> running in a separate window (of course!).  I was surprised because this
>> computer is running linux, not mswin.  I looked at the task manager and saw
>> lots of processes running that were of either uk or of no interest to me.
> what are uk processes?  English, Irish Scottish or Welsh?
>
>> in task manager, what does rss mean.  What does the memory listed in the
>> last column mean?  Is this ram in use now?  while watching, a line flashed
>> red, an another line flashes yellow once in a while. what do those mean?
> No idea, I don't run xubuntu, maybe someone more familiar can explain that
>
>> there is no 'help' button.
>>
>> also, how ids i know what the process names mea/do, and can i get rid of the
>> safely (in init.rd?)
>> i am running xubuntu 13.04
> Without knowing what you're actually running, hard to say.
>
> Try running this from a terminal to get a file listing all running
> processes at that moment:
>
> ps auxf > process.list
>
>
> Can't tell you what's causing this without that info.  It could be
> anything from you don't have enough RAM to you've got too many
> programs open at once causing the system to swap to disk to a run-away
> program that's got a memory leak bug to many other things that cause
> disk thrashing.
>
if you are asking what language the processes are, the answer is 
English.  By unknown, I do not know what, for example dconf-service is.  
I think I got it (UK means unknown).  Some I can figure out, but I don't 
know why they are running.  I executed your suggestion, but I am unable 
to vertically select text in gedit so it would take quite a while to 
parse just the process names.  In any event that I assume that mine is a 
rather plain vanilla version of ub, therefore most people know what 
processes are running.