Arch Linux

Rydgel

Member

From: France

Registered: 2008-09-04

Posts: 166

Website

Big freeze and memory problems

Hello everyone

I'm pretty new in the wonderful world of ArchLinux. The installation was quite easy, thanks to the beginners guide and the wiki.

My laptop is a :

AMD Athlon Turion 64 1800 Mhz
ATI radeon xpress 200M
1024Mo RAM

So my system is currently like this :

Gnome + compiz-fusion
My ati is running with fglrx

Everything works fine except a "bizarre" thing with my memory.

When I start my computer :

top - 15:15:22 up 2 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.64, 0.40, 0.16
Tasks: 104 total,   1 running, 103 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  7.6%us,  6.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 85.4%id,  0.7%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    903920k total,   412252k used,   491668k free,    15900k buffers
Swap:  1164672k total,        0k used,  1164672k free,   148144k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 3696 rydgel    20   0 10460 4472 3504 S  5.6  0.5   0:05.40 mpd                
 3697 rydgel    20   0 10324 3656 2728 S  3.3  0.4   0:03.44 mpd                
 3865 root      20   0  275m  86m  21m S  2.7  9.8   0:06.55 Xorg               
 4097 rydgel    20   0 38740  14m  10m S  1.3  1.7   0:00.43 gnome-terminal     
 4092 rydgel    20   0 19460 3956 3272 S  1.0  0.4   0:00.19 conky              
   28 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.3  0.0   0:00.01 ata/0              
 3891 rydgel    20   0  5932 4412 1812 S  0.3  0.5   0:00.99 gconfd-2           
 3954 rydgel    20   0 84160  21m  14m S  0.3  2.4   0:00.77 nautilus           
 3966 rydgel    20   0 54932  13m 9.8m S  0.3  1.5   0:00.59 nm-applet          
 4072 rydgel    20   0 18144 8368 6732 S  0.3  0.9   0:00.15 emerald            
    1 root      20   0  1664  564  496 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.70 init               
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 kthreadd           
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0        
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0        
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0         
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 events/0           
    7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper

And after a few minutes :

top - 16:47:47 up 59 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.67, 1.58, 1.96
Tasks: 108 total,   2 running, 106 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 13.7%us, 32.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 53.3%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    903920k total,   893568k used,    10352k free,    85128k buffers
Swap:  1164672k total,        0k used,  1164672k free,   232032k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 3862 root      20   0  314m 129m  32m S 19.6 14.7   7:53.44 Xorg               
 4183 rydgel    20   0 10456 4500 3508 S 14.3  0.5   5:07.84 mpd                
 4098 rydgel    20   0  242m 100m  27m R 14.0 11.4   9:35.00 firefox            
 4184 rydgel    20   0 10524 3996 2736 S  1.7  0.4   1:00.75 mpd                
 4061 rydgel    20   0 18124  13m 4616 S  0.3  1.5   0:23.53 compiz             
 4082 rydgel    20   0 20484 3988 3272 S  0.3  0.4   0:07.09 conky              
    1 root      20   0  1664  560  496 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.75 init               
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd           
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0        
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 ksoftirqd/0        
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0         
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.09 events/0           
    7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper            
    8 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 kblockd/0          
    9 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid             
   10 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpi_notify       
   11 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.07 kseriod

So you can see that my free mem decreases dramaticly until it's 0 then .. FREEZE (about 8 s ) and after that 150Mb ~ free mem.

My memory grows when I do things like scrolling in firefox, watching video ..

And with my others distros I never saw something like that in the same configuration.

Maybe someone can help me

Ch00k

Member

From: Lvov/Ukraine

Registered: 2008-08-25

Posts: 6

Website

Re: Big freeze and memory problems

I've got similar problem. After 5-10 minutes of system uptime almost all my 900Mb of memory are used. Regardles of what DE I use (be it KDEmod3, KDEmod4, Gnome, XFCE, E17) - after 10 minutes of system works I have only 10-20 Mb free.
P.S. I do not use 3D graphical desktops.