Slow and out of processes

have a strange problem on my desktop computer, a somewhat old AMD Phenom II x4 running openSuSE 15.1

This stared to happen some weeks ago but I was not using this machine much at this time but it is now so bad that it interferes with other thinngs like reporting the other problem.

When I boot the machine and log in it takes minutes to display the xterm which is the second line of ~/.xinitrc the first being xset r rate 660 40
I run fvwm on the screen so no gnoe or kde.

When it eventually gives me an xterm it is a further minutte orso before I get a prompt. If I type at it immediately I get message “out of processes”. After a while I can run comands. However if I open another xterm it get the out of processes message and sometimes it hangs or the window disappears.

I have not changed my environment on tiscoputer for years but do upgrade the software from time to time

What seems odd to me is that other computers running the same OS do not show this phenomenon.

Where should I look? Looking at dmesg I sometimes see messages that it has run out of swap. I have a swap partition of 530145 blocks according to /proc/partitions but it does. Not seem to be mentioned in df output.

So, where do I look and what do I change/investigate/reload …

==John ff

So what is the size of your memory and what is the use of swap:

/usr/sbin/swapon

BTW, swap is not to be found in df, because df is about file systems.

4gig as it has been for years. Swap is 500000 blocks again as ever.

I have never seen it with a large number of processes but things get unresponsive when it happens.

I have not seen this with remote login or from a pts