[wellylug] Lightweight browsers, and window managers

[Sam Cannell]

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 14:08, Nick Jensen wrote:

> So by running free when a few apps are running I should be able to see that 
> my swap memory is getting used? I'll give that a try tonight.
> Assuming that processes are being killed because they are using too  much 
> memory, is that something I can stop? I'd rather have the machine thrash for 
> a minute or two and let me close the non-essential ones than lose whatever 
> I'm doing.

Having processes killed due to lack of memory is generally a sign that
you either have far too little swap, or there's something seriously
wrong with the setup on your machine.

At my last employer we had a linux box running sendmail / amavis /
sophos for virus scanning of incoming mail.  Unfortunately however,
whenever the internet connection went down, a lot of email would get
queued up waiting to come in.  When the link came back up, the sudden
mass of mail would cause sendmail to spawn dozens and dozens of perl
processes to scan the mail, which would bring the machine to a complete
standstill and cause it to start killing all the other processes on the
box.  I remember once the load average got over 100 :)

Anyhow, assuming that the problem you're having is caused by a lack of
available memory and that there's nothing like the situation above
happening on your PC, then it's a fairly safe assumption that you have
insufficient swap.

If you haven't got a free partition you can use as a swapfile, something
like this will suffice:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/.swapfile bs=1048576 count=128
mkswap /usr/.swapfile
swapon /usr/.swapfile

Will create a 128 megabyte swapfile at /usr/.swapfile, write a swap
signature to it and enable it.  If you want it to be enabled on every
boot, add a line to /etc/fstab like:

/usr/.swapfile       none            swap    sw              0       0

If you want to use more than 128mb, alter the count= parameter to be the
size in megabytes.

Cheers,

Sam
-- 
Sam Cannell <sam at plaz.net.nz>
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