Observations

[Ken Schweigert]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 06:17:57PM -0400, S.M.Kelly wrote:
> I've been using YDL on my 2001 TiBook now for almost a month.  I've made
> a couple of observations that I'd like some feedback/confirmation/help
> on.  
> 
> First, my CPU fan seems to run almost constantly.  My CPU is usually
> fairly idle and doesn't seem to be running many active threads. This
> makes battery life horrible.
> 
> Second, Gnome uses a lot of RAM!  As I use Gnome, I see my RAM usage
> steadily creeping up until it gets to nearly 95% of usage. (remember, I
> have 512mb!)  When I use KDE, it stays around 30-40% usage.  I use the
> same applications most of the day. (Xmms, Evolution, OOo, primarily)

If the three applications you listed above are your primary applications, 
do you really need all the bells and whistles that KDE/Gnome provides?
For what I need a window manager to do, both Gnome and KDE are too big.
On my home and work workstations, I use Fluxbox http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/
It's small, very minimal, and lightning fast. 

> Third, I NEVER have seen my 512mb swap file being used.  Does the swap
> file only get used when your physical RAM is maxed?

Correct.  Linux will try to load and run everything it can from RAM.
Once it runs out of RAM, it "swaps" out to disk to free up RAM for the
current application.
 
> Fourth, there are various times I notice my hard drive starts spinning
> like crazy.  I can hear it clicking away like it's accessing things, but
> nothing (that I know of) is running.  Is this indexing or something
> going on?

As others have mentioned, it's slocate reindexing your files.  On my machine,
there is an entry in /etc/cron.daily for slocate.  IIRC, the daily cron stuff 
runs at 4:00am.  Since my machine is turned off then, it runs as soon as I
log in.
 
> I'm not a Linux expert (yet) so I'm trying to get a better grip on all
> that's going on here.  Thanks!!
> 
> Sean M. Kelly
> =========================
> SMKSensei@Mac.com

-- 
Ken Schweigert, Network Administrator
Byte Productions, LLC
http://www.byte-productions.com