On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 13:16:22 +0200, the_troubadour wrote:
> ozaan@yahoo.co.uk (Ozan Turky?lmaz) wrote:
>
>> i am going to do some guessing now
>> if your computer is up for a very long time
>> then linux kernel starts to do worser swapping and MM
>> (lately this is very rarely)
>> but maybe but maybe
>> your hd needs defrag
>
> That's not very likely. May I ask how you would go about
> defragmenting, assuming your root is not on vfat *g*?

Indeed, the defrag issue is so unlikely that we might as well assume
it's wrong. Filesystem fragmentation is not an issue for more
sophisticated filesystems (as compared to FAT), which is probably why,
despite significant demand, we don't have defragmenters. (We *do* have
anti-virus software available, because that's something clueless IT
managers are willing to spend money on.[1])

The other guess, however, is a good one. My machine which is not quite
as good as the OP's suffers seriously degraded performance in X after a
week or two. The cure is to get out of and restart X.

The parts which are wrong are to say that's "rarely", and to attribute
the cause to Linux memory management. It's a sure thing, if you use a
mostly stock Slackware as a typical workstation, and leave your X
running long enough (obviously, a shorter period for me with only 256MB
RAM than for the OP with 1GB.) And the memory management is excellent,
because getting out of X frees up all the swap.

Either X (I've seen this under both x.org and XFree86) or something I
run in X causes this issue.



[1] Not to imply that all antivirus packages are useless, of course;
server-side protection for Windows machines is a Good Thing.
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