diagnose & wm Re: [wplug] Performance Anxiety

Patryk Laurent patryk at pakl.net
Sun Jul 13 15:33:34 EDT 2003


Pete,

One thing I would do is run the "uptime" command (just open a terminal 
window and type "uptime").

[patryk at smithers patryk]$ uptime
  3:28pm  up 9 days,  5:58, 17 users,  load average: 0.33, 0.08, 0.02
[patryk at smithers patryk]$ 

If you have a 1.00 or something large where I have a 0.33, that means some
process is (or processes are) using a lot of your CPU.  If this is the
case, I would then try running the "top" command.  This command displays a
"table of processes"  sorted by how much CPU time they're using.  (To exit
top, hit "q", or just close the terminal window.)

Keeping "top" running should give you a good indication of what processes 
are so intensive.  Also, "top" will also tell you about what % of your 
memory is being used by each process.  If all your memory is used up, 
"virtual memory" will be used, by swapping memory to disk.  This is quite 
time consuming.

And now my $0.02:  In my experience, the Redhat default "KDE" window
manager always saps up large quantities of RAM and CPU power.  If any of
the above is true, I would recommend switching to a lighter window manager
such as "WindowMaker".  Check out www.windowmaker.org.  Without exception,
installing Windowmaker is the first thing I do after installing RedHat.

Good luck,
Patryk


On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, Pete Butler wrote:

> Hello.
> 
> I attended the InstallFest yesterday (thanks to everyone who helped my wife 
> and I!) and got Red Hat 9 installed on my laptop (an IBM Thinkpad 
> 390X).  I've been playing around with it a bit today, and I've discovered 
> that it's dirt slow.
> 
> The machine uses a 500 MHz Pentium III with 256 Megs RAM, and it runs Win2K 
> just fine (dual boot).  But under Linux, it chugs mightily, and all but the 
> simplest applications are crash-prone.
> 
> This makes me suspect something is misconfigured.  But before I start 
> blundering blindly though config files, I figured I'd post the question here:
> 
> If your machine were exhibiting this kind of behavior, where would you 
> start investigating?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> -- Pete Butler
> 
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