[SWLUG] KDE slowing down problem?

[Justin Mitchell]

On 27 Jul, Neil Jones wrote:
> 	
> Anyone any ideas why my KDE desktop is slowing to a crawl on occasions?
> 
> There is plenty of room on the hard disk but on occasions it slows right down 
> with a lot of disk accesses.
> 
> I do have a lot of emails inside Kmail but it seems more associated with 
> Konqueror. Another sysmtom is terminal windows taking an age to open.
> It is is not constant an may be more prevalent after the machine has been 
> left on and unattended for a while.

Disk space is generally irrelevant to the speed of anything.

You problem sounds rather more like it is related to the amount of
memory (ie RAM) in your machine. A lot of the standard gui applications,
like pretty mail readers, web browsers, office programs etc. use very
large amounts of memory. When your systems starts to get short of memory
it increasingly 'swaps' it onto and off of disk, which is needless to
say much slower than ram.  Therefore when your machine gets really busy
(memory wise) the disk accesses go up and everything slows down.

take a look at the output of the 'free' program, and see how much of
swap is being used, if this is significantly larger than just a few kb,
then you want to run less programs, or get more ram.

You can see how much ram an individual program is using by looking at
the output of 'ps aux' two columns of interest VSZ is the amount of
virtual memory used, RSS is how much physical ram is being used right
now.