I seem to have everything installed and running but the system is running a bit slow. I know that my system is kind of old to begin with but if I pull up a system monitor it looks like my CPU is fine but the RAM is pegged at near it’s maximum pretty much constantly. This is true even when nothing is really running and it’s just sitting on the desktop. Are there any tips or anything for reducing RAM usage in openSUSE?
My system specs are:
2.5ghz Intel Celeron
1gb RAM (not quite sure what speed (I think PC2100 or 2700) it’s been a long time since it’s been installed but it’s an older PC and I know it’s DDR not DDR2)
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro
30gb hard drive
That’s about it. If there’s any other information that would be helpful I’m sure I can dig it up. Thanks in advance.
1 gig is plenty, unless you’re running lots of things at once.
Run ‘free -tm’ in a terminal, and you’ll probably discover that most of the apparent usage is in fact just cache.
Tips for optimising - remove beagle (in YaST software management), disable ipv6 (in YaST network settings), and disable desktop effects. Or try a lightweight environment - XFCE is quite nice, and quite light. LXDE is even lighter, but I don’t like it myself. You might…
It looks like it’s using around 750mb of the 989 that is present. Some of that (434) is cache though. How do I remove the two items that you mentioned? I went in to yast software management and did a search for Beagle but wasn’t sure what out of the items that came up was already installed and how to remove them. I had kind of the same issue with the other one too.
Anything with a tick in the box next to it is installed. You can safely remove anything with beagle in its name by changing said tick to a cross, and hitting accept.
For ipv6 you don’t have to remove anything, just set the option to off in global settings in network management.
You can search for a package and examine its description - kerry is in fact a KDE / beagle search tool - removing it will cause no harm, and you can always put it back later if you want to.
The general user consensus is fairly much against beagle and its derivatives. Some people like it, but many of the people that don’t… really don’t.
It isn’t installed by default in 11.2 - neither is kerry. Runs fine so far (well… it keeps breaking, but that’s entirely my fault. ;))
[Although obviously, if trying to remove kerry tries to pull half of KDE with it, stop. Though I’m pretty sure it won’t…]
OK thanks. I am just a bit jumpy about uninstalling the wrong thing and wasn’t sure if they were related or not. By the way just disabling ipv6 saw a noticeable drop in RAM usage. What is that?
It’s the new internet protocol, mostly being introduced because we’re running out of IP addresses. Unfortunately, some software (think it’s ISP dependent) causes problems with it - specifically slow DNS resolution, I think. Doesn’t at present cause any harm turning it off.
I don’t know but I’ve got this widget open showing cpu and RAM usage and it is quite a bit lower now and it pretty much coincided exactly with disabling that. In fact it was much more noticeable then uninstalling beagle and disabling desktop effects.
Anyways, thanks for the help. I pretty much decided to try linux to milk a few more years out of this PC. I probably should have gone with something less graphic intensive then KDE but if I can reduce the demand a bit it’s running pretty well right now anyway. I like messing with this stuff too so it’s another reason to tinker.
You can also install preload, if you want to use it slightly more intelligently - this should make programs open faster at the sacrifice of a slightly longer boot.
