Memory Leak!

[psych0]

I seem to be having a very similar ssortt of a problem... Except I can't say that Liinux is doing a very good job caching, sinnce my X is hellishly slow!!!!

I'm running

a p4 - 1,8 G Toshiba Sattelite laptop...
with 512 Ram
and a GeForce4

it is mad annoying that even under Windows the GUI part of the system runs as fast as a rabbit, but once I switch to Linux it is actually slower than my old Acer lappy with 128ram and a bad bad bad videocard by neomagic.
It is slow to thee point where I caan actually see it redrawing the screen 10 times when I switch virtual workplaces... or ask it to shade a window (windowmaker style doubleclick on a titlebar)!!!

this is all the same whetthher I run the new drivers which come with the X distro or the NVIDIA provided drivers...

here is the info I have showing up in top:

Mem: 515620k total, 350308k used, 165312k free, 15660k buffers
Swap: 385452k total, 0k used, 385452k free, 194624k cached

22851 root 9 0 176m 47m 3480 S 7.3 9.5 1:34.95 X

here is the more alarming info I get from the Gnome thing
X -> using 176 MB memory and from
Total: 176 MB
Rss: 47,9 MB
Shared: 3.4 MB


this all seems to be verry alarming... anyhow, whenever I start a new app onnce X is running it seems that it has to go through swap slowing everrything down...
I do not have clue about the agp factor of it all...
is there any way to fix it???
or is this a commmon problem? if u can call it such?

[psych0]

scrap that....
the major problem is not even the memory.... it is the CPU which is running at 100% once I start X!!!!

check this out:
top - 10:13:26 up 1:15, 2 users, load average: 1.74, 1.90, 1.86
Tasks: 60 total, 5 running, 54 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.4% user, 94.6% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 515620k total, 292764k used, 222856k free, 18740k buffers
Swap: 385452k total, 0k used, 385452k free, 191064k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31470 root 9 0 141m 13m 3084 R 5.4 2.7 0:22.83 X
19040 psycho 9 0 9388 9384 6820 S 1.0 1.8 0:00.45 gnome-terminal
2 root 13 0 0 0 0 R 0.5 0.0 0:19.70 keventd
10688 psycho 9 0 9372 9368 6800 S 0.5 1.8 0:03.61 gnome-system-mo
19681 psycho 10 0 996 996 812 R 0.5 0.2 0:00.04 top
22429 root 13 0 0 0 0 Z 0.5 0.0 0:00.01 kacpidp <defunct>
1 root 8 0 228 228 196 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.71 init
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd_CPU0
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bdflush
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 kupdated
428 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 khubd
638 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kjournald
1613 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kjournald
3328 root 9 0 692 692 528 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.02 cardmgr
4649 root 9 0 612 612 528 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.01 syslogd
5316 root 9 0 460 460 400 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 klogd

pretty crazy isn't it???

[Chalnoth]

Originally posted by psych0
[b]this all seems to be verry alarming... anyhow, whenever I start a new app onnce X is running it seems that it has to go through swap slowing everrything down...

That top output that you just showed said that the swap file wasn't in use at all. I would double check that:

1. You have the latest updated Kernel.
2. Your hard drives are using DMA mode.

Edit:
Oh, could you please put the top output in [code]? That should make it more readable.