[Tfug] Memory woes

[Jim March]

On 2/3/07, Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But all that has suddenly changed.  I recently installed SUSE 10.2 x86-64,
> and my computer has slowed down considerably.  The stupid *#@#$* thing
> thrashes about and everything works at a
> standstill.  I recently added a gig of memory, pushing the system to
> 1.25gigs, and nothing's helped.  I don't know where to start digging,
> because
> everything seems screwy.  KDE processes are taking
> 100-150 mb of memory.  I've got (at present time) 2 ssh connections, and
> sshd is reporting 120mb of memory devoted to each process.  The mythtv
> backend is swallowing another 400mb.
>
> I don't understand - this hasn't been a problem in the past.  I don't
> think
> it's a window manager issue either, though I do understand that my use of
> KDE may be a factor...
>
> Any thoughts?


Ummm...that's weird.

I was running OpenSuse 10.2 on my weird old laptop - 2ghz P4, 768megs RAM,
ancient 32meg ATI Radeon 7500 video card.  Ran fine, performance was right
on par with both Ubuntu and Fedora Core 6 although I was running Gnome
instead of KDE.  Damned stable, too.  I even tried it on a P3/450 with
384megs RAM, that one WAS with KDE, ran...well, not "great" but usable.  I
was testing on an old "scrap" machine at a non-profit looking for an
alternative to Win98 on volunteer basic-use boxes.

<scratches head>

I'm thinking the install went wrong?  Have you made sure it's got the right
kernel in there?  Maybe make sure it's running a 64bit base?

I've enjoyed Fedora Core 6 much more than OpenSuse 10.2 though, and found
them equally stable.  Package management in FC6 is closer to "Debian grade"
than that horrible YaST stuff...you might consider distro-hopping...FC6
tends to run very modern kernels, I'm up into the 2.6.19 family right now
and damn, it's still solid as a rock.

My take: OpenSuse isn't nice enough to be worth spending huge amounts of
time on if it's gone screwy on you.

Jim