on Sat, Nov 11, 2000 at 12:02:24PM -0800, Jatin Golani ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
wrote:
> Hi ppl,
>
> let me first thank everyone that's been helping me.
>
> I have a Debian 2.2 system..with GNOME and Window Maker...on a pentium
^^^^^
> 133 Mhz..32 MB RAM...and 64 MB Swap....i've noticed this with Netscape
^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^
> 4.75 ...while i'm trying to send mail using my webmail page...which
> works fine in windows and has no Java,etc...if i type a lot (i tried
> that with dummy data too)....then suddenly the system starts slowing
> down...the hard disk starts running too much....everything comes to a
> crawl...if i go to another tty then it takes ages and sometimes I get
> the message contionously VM: do_try_to_free_pages; failed for
> kswapd...or netscape of something or the other"....and i cant even log
> onto another tty or do anything else....have to reboot.
>
> Could someone explain the problem to me....Linux is supposed to be
> stable and i'm new to it....what's the prob
This isn't a crash, it's a system slowdown. Almost certainly resulting
from insufficient free memory. Netscape is a memory pig, and 32 MB RAM
is almost certainly insufficient given the clients you're running --
GNOME is also fairly intensive.
Get more memory, get a better box, or ditch GNOME and/or Netscape. 96 -
128 MB is recommended for a typical current-generation workstation.
You can view system memory utilization with the command 'free':
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 95608 93704 1904 30496 3844 20256
-/+ buffers/cache: 69604 26004
Swap: 403772 99344 304428
...While GNU/Linux tends to utilized all available memory, what you want
to look at are the swap usage (97 MB in my case), and the 'buffers' and
'cached' values. More swap use means you've got programs swapped out to
disk. High values of swap mean there's not enough active memory for
software. Buffers and cache are opportunistic use of memory for
recently read data -- I can essentially subtract 20 MB from my memory
utilization as this memory will be freed as it's needed (though this
then slows down disk access by making less memory available for
caching).
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc. http://www.zelerate.org
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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