Is my computer under spec?

[Tim Aslat]

In the immortal words of "Loren M. Lang" <lorenl at alzatex.com>...
> I have been having performance problems with my computer for months,
> ever since I did a fresh install of freebsd 5.2.1.  I thought the
> situation might change after debugging was turned off in RELENG_5 so I
> upgraded a couple weeks ago to 5.3-BETA7, but only saw slight
> improvements.  I'm running Xorg, fvwm 2.4, several xterms, vncviewer,
> mozilla, xmms, and xine and my system was really running slow.  At
> some point mozilla was killed because the system was out of swap
> space.  I have a pentium celeron 3 600 MHz, with 128 megs of ram, 30
> gig hd, 256 meg swap.  Is my system just under spec for freebsd 5.x or
> is something else wrong?

First thing to check is how much ram is being used by the system.  the
Top command is your best friend in this case, check to see what kind of
memory usage each program has.  It will also show how much CPU usage
they are using.  

> I didn't really think this should push a system like this that hard. 
> I might try running linux on it in a similar configuration to compare
> and maybe think about some more ram if it also has problems.

I would be suspecting RAM is your main bottleneck.  Does your hard drive
seem to be constantly working?

I have 512Mb of ram installed and I'm still using some swap (33%) but I
also have quite a number of programs running continuously (firefox,
sylpheed-claws, several aterms, xmms,wmweather+, fluxbox-devel and a few
other odda & sods).  I could probably optimise this, but the actual swap
appears to be reasonably well managed and doesn't thrash my hard drives.

I think you will find the machine is fine, for most things, just needs a
little more RAM.

Cheers

Tim


-- 
Tim Aslat <tim at spyderweb.com.au>
Spyderweb Consulting
http://www.spyderweb.com.au
Phone: +61 0401088479