[plug] FC3 running slowly with a lot of HDD activity

[Jim Householder]

Ari Finander wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been having problems recently with my FC3 system (fully updated). Programs start very slowly compared to a month ago, and there's a lot more hard disk drive activity than before during the lag. The hard drive with the OS and swap has 29.9GB free space (it's a 40GB drive). There's 512mb of memory. The software RAID 1 drives are almost full (only about 10% left of 200GB), but only the mozilla user directories are stored on (and thus accessed from) that drive, and there is 20GB of free space left there. Where should I start with trouble shooting this? In windows I'd be running a defrag. The file systems are  extension 3.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ari
> 
Check /var/log/dmesg, first 20 lines or so, to find how much RAM the 
system is detecting.  Sounds like you may have a thrashing problem, 
where not all the RAM is detected/used, and the swap file is getting 
excessive use.

Jim