John Sowden wrote:
On Sunday 24 April 2005 06:14, you wrote:
John Sowden wrote:
I am running a 48MB 133Mhz machine with Suse 8.0 It has worked fine on the net until today. The spped slowed down often to less than 100 bytes per second, and the hard drive thrashed for hours.
Questions: Should the swap partition be empty upon cold boot? If so what is the command to test it to see how full it is, and to empty it, and in which boot file should it go?
It took me 8 hours to look at about 30 web pages of a ecommerce site. I never was able to make my purchases. Sometimes, it would take 15 minutes to bring a page up. more ram is an easy answer, but this is an old machine, and 48MB is overkill for other work. what has changed?
Swap is normally managed transparently, so you don't have to do anything. I'd suspect your problem lies elsewhere. What does "cat /proc/meminfo" show?
cat /proc/meminfo reads: total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 46915584 45912064 1003520 0 2072576 20795392 Swap: 123367424 26206208 97161216
The above shows you're using little more than 1/5th of your swap space, so that's not your problem. Top can show what processes are using the most CPU resources. Also bear in mind that a 133 MHz 48 MB system is not going to be fast, if you're running KDE or Gnome.