Man pages take forever on slow machine?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 09:26:52PM -0800, Scott I. Remick wrote:
> Ok so I got over my hurdle getting FreeBSD 5.3 installed on this old
> Presario (it ended up being RAM... needed more than 16MB to get through
> install, borrowed some and then could then back off to default 16MB after
> 5.3 was on). I thought I was on a roll until I "accidentally" tried to bring
> up a man page. It has been on "Formatting page, please wait..." ever since.
> 
> I didn't pay attention to when, but I think it was at least an hour ago.
> Yes, an HOUR. And I still don't have my man page.
> 
> Yes this isn't the fastest machine (I think it's a Pentium 133MHz, 16MB RAM)
> but really... I ran FreeBSD 2.2.2 as a webserver on a 486 66MHz "back in the
> day". I'd expect this to be slow, but... 1+ hours for a man page? 

It might be swapping itself to death because you're overloading the
system.  If you install the 'catpages' distribution from sysinstall
(preformatted manpages) then you'll probably get past this problem,
but you'll quickly find that 16MB RAM is not enough to do many useful
things with on 5.x.  You'd probably be better off with an older
release (4.x, or even 2.x if you don't mind unfixed security
vulnerabilities), because they were designed to run on systems with
less memory.

Kris
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20041228/12d54bae/attachment.bin