disk thrashing

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I just read the August Linux Journal review of Mandrake 8.0, and they
commented that the default install uses quite a bit of  RAM to run the KDE
Desktop.  I found thrashing pretty severe at 128M, but at 256 or better it
seemed ok - "free" indicates about 230M in use.

While RedHat might be a little lighter on RAM than Mandrake, if you're
running a current KDE or Gnome desktop, you could still be using enough RAM
to cause serious thrashing.

Oh, and the size of your swap partition doesn't affect how much thrashing
you see - thrashing (often) happens when you run very low on physical RAM
and the system starts swapping pages for basic operations.

A lot of software being distributed for Linux now has a lot of debugging
code in it - Mozilla, KDE, etc.  That makes the RAM images much larger.
That and the notorious inefficiency of Xwindows and you've got a system that
needs significantly more RAM to run smoothly than certain systems that are
distributed only in stripped-binary format (from, perhaps, Redmond, WA).

256M of RAM should be less than $50.  Consider a hardware upgrade.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip, Anil" <aphili01 at sprintspectrum.com>
To: <kclug at kclug.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 4:23 PM
Subject: disk thrashing

> Hi,
> I notice my (Red Hat 7.0) disk thrashing a lot - Should I be concerned?
> the swap partition was 200 Mb or so. is there something else I must do?
> thanks,
> Anil Philip
>
>