Defrag Constant HD accessing 761

In a message on 3 Apr 2006 07:26:00 -0700, wrote :

Ah! 'PHP-mySQL development'. I don't know *exactly* what you are (if improperly messed with, such as a restart of httpd) will suck down swap space and drag a machine down. I have a web server with only 128meg of RAM, which was fine until I installed RT on it. It is still OK, except when I do some RT related work (and things became better once I put in spam filtering on the E-Mail addresses feeding RT).

Check to see if you have 'stuck' httpd processes. You may have to 'kill -9' them or something. And you may end up with orphaned semaphores. These processes might be sucking up memory and causing other things (like the GUI) to become swapped out.

Also: something you might consider:

Set the machine to use init level 3 (console login) and not level 5. You can always fire up the GUI as part of your .login or manually from the command line when you log in. You can then log out at night. Instead of having X11 swapped out every morning and causing the system to thrash, you'll be starting a fresh copy (which will be 'leaner' to start with). Also, *some* of the screen savers are really computationally and-or memory intensive -- this could be causing your troubles, particularly on a machine that is also running a 'busy' database web server daemon ('PHP-mySQL') *at the same time*. Unless you you seriously excessive amounts of RAM (you don't), you really don't want to be doing this.

Robert Heller -- 978-544-68 plus 133 Deepwoods Software -- Linux Installation and Administration