[SWLUG] KDE slowing down problem?

[David Elir Evans]

Justin Mitchell wrote:

>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.
>
>
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If significant amounts of RAM are added is it also advisable to enlarge 
swap space ?