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desperanceThis desktop? Is having more trouble with its memory than I do, and that is really saying something.
All right, so it only has a gigabyte ("only"! hah! I remember when a megabyte was a huge amount, unthinkable...); but I only ask it to process words and browse LJ, to deal with my mail and dodge around on the internet a little. One gig should be plenty.
And yet, these last few days, by the end of the day it's been choking up so thoroughly it becomes literally unusable; it can take minutes to respond to a key or a mouse command. When I look at the memory usage, it reckons to have only 10MB free, with 150MB or thereabouts of cache; and the hard disk is running perpetually; and all I can do is fretfully and painstakingly close it down. Which I just had to do in the middle of the day, yet, which means it's getting worse...
I have no idea what's changed, given that nothing has in either the set-up or my usage of it. Granted I'm editing a full-length manuscript just now, but that's only a MB or so, it shouldn't be causing all this sweat and breakdown.
And I don't know what to do about it. There's probably some swift command to flush the cache, which would presumably help short-term, if I only knew it; but do I need more memory, or do I need to sort out my installation, or what? (I run Suse 10.2; I have been intending to upgrade to 11.1, but it's such a radical rewrite they recommend a whole new installation rather than upgrading. Which would be nice and clean and corretive; but causes me to worry about my data, esp as I have not yet figured out how to copy my entire current set-up onto the waiting external hard drive, prior to such a radical reinstall. Damn, why am I so much less of a geek than I ought to be...?)
All right, so it only has a gigabyte ("only"! hah! I remember when a megabyte was a huge amount, unthinkable...); but I only ask it to process words and browse LJ, to deal with my mail and dodge around on the internet a little. One gig should be plenty.
And yet, these last few days, by the end of the day it's been choking up so thoroughly it becomes literally unusable; it can take minutes to respond to a key or a mouse command. When I look at the memory usage, it reckons to have only 10MB free, with 150MB or thereabouts of cache; and the hard disk is running perpetually; and all I can do is fretfully and painstakingly close it down. Which I just had to do in the middle of the day, yet, which means it's getting worse...
I have no idea what's changed, given that nothing has in either the set-up or my usage of it. Granted I'm editing a full-length manuscript just now, but that's only a MB or so, it shouldn't be causing all this sweat and breakdown.
And I don't know what to do about it. There's probably some swift command to flush the cache, which would presumably help short-term, if I only knew it; but do I need more memory, or do I need to sort out my installation, or what? (I run Suse 10.2; I have been intending to upgrade to 11.1, but it's such a radical rewrite they recommend a whole new installation rather than upgrading. Which would be nice and clean and corretive; but causes me to worry about my data, esp as I have not yet figured out how to copy my entire current set-up onto the waiting external hard drive, prior to such a radical reinstall. Damn, why am I so much less of a geek than I ought to be...?)
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Date: 2009-02-24 08:42 pm (UTC)There's the sync command, which writes to disk everything the operating system was keeping in memory for reasons of procrastination, but that may not be what you need (it's generally something you type instantly when the lights flicker in case your power is going to fail in the next second).
If your virtual memory has been eaten it's more likely something that runs all the time has a memory leak - the X server was a traditional culprit in my day. If you could guess the problem process you might reinitialise it without a reboot with the INIT signal, as in "kill -1 process id".
Faulty chips can be easier to fix than you might think. I use to have a big old HP workstation with RAM that varied between 16 and 32 MB at the drop of a hat, which caused problems, so I took it apart. Inside there were a mixture of big and small chips, which seemed odd, but it turned out that putting your thumb on a big chip and pressing would turn it into a small one with a satisfying click as it went into its socket. It worked properly after that.
I had a lot of trouble with SUSE and everything was much nicer with a change to Ubuntu, but if you knew SUSE like I did you wouldn't be using it, so yours must be better.
For the backup, if you don't like the block copier dd you can just use tar, which is the program really meant for this, as it bundles up a file system into a single file. Reversibly.