[PLUG] Morning Slugishness

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 09:44:04AM -0700, Jason Martin wrote:
> On 7/26/06, Richard C. Steffens <rsteff at comcast.net> wrote:
> >After several hours away from my machine, i.e. it's running but idling,
> >there is a delay of up to two or three seconds between clicking on a
> >running program's button at the bottom of the screen and the display of
> >that program's window. After a couple of minutes, response time returns
> >to normal. This effect grows gradually over a period of weeks (maybe
> >months?) to the point that it becomes annoying. I'm used to some delays
> >getting a program started, but once running they usually run fine.
> >
> >Any ideas what causes this?
> 
> Is the delay from the applications being paged back in from swap?  Is
> your hard drive grinding away while the delay occurs?  Perhaps a
> background cron job (does SuSE ship with slocate/updatedb enabled?) is
> hogging your memory causing your idle apps to be paged out?
> 
> Jason

Seconded. 

I have a faster/newer machine, which runs dirvish/rsync backups at
full throttle every night, which soaks up most of the available RAM
(and network, and disk IO), swapping out most of the desktop apps. 
I am running ancient Fedora 1 with a 2.4 kernel on it.

I wonder:  Is there is some way to tell it to swap all the desktop
apps back in, after the heavy lifting is done?  Then the machine
would be ready to rock in the morning...

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs