Modred
01-18-2006, 8:20 AM
As of late, I've been having more and more problems with my Debian install. Back before Christmas, a few blocks on the hard drive were corrupted and the system wouldn't boot, but I went through the process of fixing it and everything appeared fine. At this point I was running KDE on Debian 3.1 (sarge) with a 2.6.8 kernel. After getting the system to boot, I used aptitude to upgrade a large number of packages, which also apparently reinstalled KDE for some reason. But the system worked, so I had no problems.
At this time, my computer had only 256 Mb of RAM, so when the system filled up my memory usage to around 90% I didn't think much of it, X and KDE can be memory intensive, much moreso than a command line. But for Christmas I got a stick of 512 Mb RAM, and afterwards I noticed that if left alone for a few hours, the memory usage would soar up to around 97% of my physical memory. That's over 600 Mb of RAM doing nothing, at least that I can tell. X was using about 40 Mb, and KDE was using maybe 150 total between all of it's various processes. Throw in the other processes running on the system, and it shouldn't be anywhere near 600 Mb.
So I thought it might be KDE, and I was considering switching back to GNOME anyway, so I took the opportunity to do so. Apparently, KDE was not the problem, as I left my computer alone for a few hours while running GNOME (all other factors the same) and upon return, system resources showed upper reaches of 90% memory usage.
Which brings me to last night, when I was playing around with some command line stuff in a terminal, and then thought it might be interesting to leave the system monitor open while I slept so I could see how long it took for what looked like a memory leak to occur. So I leave the system monitor running and lock the screen. Five and a half hours later, I attempt to wake the computer and my monitor yells at me that it can't support the video mode, which it reports has a refresh rate of about 530 Hz. (As a note, my default resolution is 1280x1024 at 75 Hz.)
Unable to get the screen to return for me to log in, I killed the machine with the power switch, and now I'm back in Windows and looking to find out what happened.
First: is there any way to get around a bad resolution / refresh rate without turning the computer off?
Second: what could possibly be using that much memory, and could that be related to the monitor problem?
Last semester, I would leave my computer booted into Debian for weeks and have no such problems. I'm really not sure what's going on.
At this time, my computer had only 256 Mb of RAM, so when the system filled up my memory usage to around 90% I didn't think much of it, X and KDE can be memory intensive, much moreso than a command line. But for Christmas I got a stick of 512 Mb RAM, and afterwards I noticed that if left alone for a few hours, the memory usage would soar up to around 97% of my physical memory. That's over 600 Mb of RAM doing nothing, at least that I can tell. X was using about 40 Mb, and KDE was using maybe 150 total between all of it's various processes. Throw in the other processes running on the system, and it shouldn't be anywhere near 600 Mb.
So I thought it might be KDE, and I was considering switching back to GNOME anyway, so I took the opportunity to do so. Apparently, KDE was not the problem, as I left my computer alone for a few hours while running GNOME (all other factors the same) and upon return, system resources showed upper reaches of 90% memory usage.
Which brings me to last night, when I was playing around with some command line stuff in a terminal, and then thought it might be interesting to leave the system monitor open while I slept so I could see how long it took for what looked like a memory leak to occur. So I leave the system monitor running and lock the screen. Five and a half hours later, I attempt to wake the computer and my monitor yells at me that it can't support the video mode, which it reports has a refresh rate of about 530 Hz. (As a note, my default resolution is 1280x1024 at 75 Hz.)
Unable to get the screen to return for me to log in, I killed the machine with the power switch, and now I'm back in Windows and looking to find out what happened.
First: is there any way to get around a bad resolution / refresh rate without turning the computer off?
Second: what could possibly be using that much memory, and could that be related to the monitor problem?
Last semester, I would leave my computer booted into Debian for weeks and have no such problems. I'm really not sure what's going on.