[CentOS] slow GUI

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 09:09 -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> At 08:18 AM 12/30/2005, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> >On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 07:56 -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> > > System:
> > >
> > > PIII 500Mhz
> > > 128MB memory
> > > 20GB drive
> > >
> > > Current CentOS 4.2
> > > Gnome GUI
> > >
> > > The system runs 'idle' at around 70Mb memory used and 4% cpu usage.
> > >
> > > But whenever I go to start a task:
> > >
> > > Start Gedit, Services tool, a Terminal window, Firefox
> > >
> > > It takes a minute or so.  CPU mayyyypeak at 100% briefly then come
> > > down.  Memory has yet to exceed 100Mb usage.
> > >
> > > Any pointers of where to look to see why it is slow?
> > >
> >Why it is slow is easy ... RHEL-4 (and therefore CentOS) doesn't work
> >correctly in GUI mode with less than 256MB RAM.
> >
> >If you run top and look, you will have lots of SWAP usage ... which is
> >simulating system memory onto hard drive.  This is VERY slow and makes
> >things take forever :)
> 
> Oh well...
> 
> Since this is targeted as my DNS and mail server, I had better get 
> more memory quickly!
> 
> I had been using gnome's system monitor.  And although it showed 43Mb 
> of swap used (of 256Mb) it did not show any swap activity.
> 
> I will try and figure out how to use top.
----
If all you need it for is to serve dns and mail there is no need to run
a gui and the machine should be quite adequate at run level 3.

Install webmin to configure/monitor and use command line too. If vi is
too cumbersome to learn, 'yum install emacs' as emacs is a bit easier to
use.

Craig