Excess processes

Colin Law clanlaw at googlemail.com
Fri May 17 08:05:05 UTC 2013


On 17 May 2013 08:49, pete smout <psmouty at live.com> wrote:
> On 16/05/13 21:13, Colin Law wrote:
>>
>> On 16 May 2013 17:23, 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.
>>
>>
>> If the hard disk thrashing you may have run out of RAM.  How much have you
>> got?
>> In a terminal, run
>> top
>> and see how much swap you are using, if that is more than a few tens
>> of Meg it probably means you have not got enough RAM.
>>
>> Colin
>>
> Hi,
>
> Don't want to hi-jack this thread but I'm following it with interest, as I
> have noticed my hard disc light on alot after upgrade from 11-04 to 13-04
> (via 12-04, 12-10)!
>
> Does that mean I need more ram?
>
> Tasks: 224 total,   2 running, 221 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
> %Cpu(s):  4.0 us,  2.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 92.8 id,  0.5 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.7 si,  0.0
> st
> KiB Mem:   3093632 total,  2288352 used,   805280 free,   274240 buffers
> KiB Swap:  2085884 total,    88684 used,  1997200 free,   933548 cached

No you have plenty for what you are doing.  You are not using a lot of
swap and the amount of RAM available for re-use should it be needed
(free + buffers + cached) is 2GB.

In terms of total RAM (of which you seem to have 3GB) 1GB is enough
for Ubuntu + Unity provided you do not try to run too much at once,
and 2GB is enough for most purposes unless you want to have dozens of
firefox tabs open or go in for editing large videos and so on.

>
>
> If so might have to use XFCE instead of Unity if it is becoming so resource
> heavy ;(

There should be no need for that.

Colin




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