[PLUG] Snappy response not so snappy anymore

[Dick Steffens]

On 05/05/2016 09:18 AM, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
> My primary suggestion is to check swap usage (can also be done with top, or
> free).

KiB Mem:   8113860 total,  7904916 used,   208944 free,   526492 buffers
KiB Swap:  8255484 total,   836256 used,  7419228 free.  2771156 cached Mem

> I know we're not running MS Windows here, but I have yet to find a
> perfectly behaved browser that doesn't eventually leak memory, and if
> you're like me, you have a browser running for Quite Some Time between
> restarts,

True. I usually fire up Thunderbird and Firefox running as soon as I 
restart.

> and you may end up using swap even with very little actually
> currently "happening" on the system.

I have had to restart Firefox once in awhile. It used to act strange and 
the strangeness went away after shutting it down and restart it 
(Firefox, not the whole machine.) But that hasn't happened for many 
months. Maybe the fixed a leak during an upgrade.

> I usually don't need a reboot to
> reclaim the swap, but I'll restart the browser, and if I want to verify
> that the swap usage is gone, I'll swapoff -a; swapon -a (as root) to verify
> that all of that 'used' swap isn't really being used anymore.
>
> This last step is not necessary, since the stuff that is swapped out is
> either unlikely to swap back in and is fine sitting on disk, or does swap
> in once and then isn't swapped back out (until the next iteration of the
> vicious cycle), I just like seeing Swap at 0 because it satisfies some
> compulsion I have for closing things :)
>
> That's what tends to cure my "occasional slowdowns" that aren't
> network-filesystem-related, YMMV

After I finish today's work I'll play around with this and other ideas.

Thanks for the tips.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens