- #1
Hepth
Gold Member
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So I know an awful lot about computers. Currently at work they have me on this older Core2 with Ubuntu 12.04 and 2GBs of ram. The computer itself is fast and fine, UNTIL you have some programs open.
When looking at "htop" (a better version of "top" in unix) I see that if I have mathematica open and firefox, those two programs hit my physical memory barrier of 2GB, and the swap file starts to get larger (maybe >500MB). As soon as this happens the computer becomes unmanagebly slow; as in I can't even click on another program or desktopfile without waiting for more than 10-15 seconds. I can hear the HDD working its butt off too...
I turned off the 3D GUI/startups/etc so there's no overhead, but I cannot avoid using both firefox/adobe reader and mathematica at the same time.
Are there any options for proiority of swap file usage in unix/linux that could maybe force mathematica to use more virtual memory rather than physical as it sits? Its not a processor problem but a memory one. Does the sound signify that mayber the HD is going bad and the bottleneck is the writing to swap (the HD is gettign a little louder).
This is a clean install of Ubuntu. There are no other applications open at all. I remember reading once there were ways to change the swap file's priority. In windows I know what I would do, I would delete the swap, defrag the entire drive, and make a static-sized swap so its in one chunk of the hard drive. Do people do similar things in linux?
Thanks for any help!
-Hepth
When looking at "htop" (a better version of "top" in unix) I see that if I have mathematica open and firefox, those two programs hit my physical memory barrier of 2GB, and the swap file starts to get larger (maybe >500MB). As soon as this happens the computer becomes unmanagebly slow; as in I can't even click on another program or desktopfile without waiting for more than 10-15 seconds. I can hear the HDD working its butt off too...
I turned off the 3D GUI/startups/etc so there's no overhead, but I cannot avoid using both firefox/adobe reader and mathematica at the same time.
Are there any options for proiority of swap file usage in unix/linux that could maybe force mathematica to use more virtual memory rather than physical as it sits? Its not a processor problem but a memory one. Does the sound signify that mayber the HD is going bad and the bottleneck is the writing to swap (the HD is gettign a little louder).
This is a clean install of Ubuntu. There are no other applications open at all. I remember reading once there were ways to change the swap file's priority. In windows I know what I would do, I would delete the swap, defrag the entire drive, and make a static-sized swap so its in one chunk of the hard drive. Do people do similar things in linux?
Thanks for any help!
-Hepth
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