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?