Computer runs slower as the day goes on!

misc · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2003 Posts: 109

Hello... Got a fairly new dell notebook (Inspiron 5150) running Xfce-4... works fine in the morning, but as it gets hotter, I notice it getting slower. As an example:

Open up a transparent Eterm in the morning, I can move it around all nice and smoothly, but few hours later, if I try to move the Eterm around, it moves really slow, jerky all over the place.

So yeah, the laptop gets fairly hot as well, the fans are going and all, but still it goes slow. The cpu still runs at 3ghz however.

I haven't got ACPI enabled - maybe this will help? Also, I'm running kernel 2.6.0-test8... I've got 2.6.2 but haven't put it on yet.. that's the next step (was going to upgrade to it anyway).

Any ideas?

Earthwings · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 9:16 am Post subject:

Run top and look for a program consuming your memory or cpu. IIRC the last time I ran xfce4 there was a kind of memory leak (in the panel?). If your laptop gets too hot, it can happen that throttle cycles slow it down to decrease the heat. Everything just a guess...

aman · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2004 6:41 am Post subject:

And you shouldnt have to worry about ACPI for cooling reasons, the fans on the inspiron 5150 are BIOS controlled.

I had better results when using a 2.4.x smp kernel (mine has that HT bs). For some reason my system was real buggy in gentoo until I went back to 2.4. Oh, and with the generic vesa frambuffer drivers compiled in the kernel, and nvidia-kernel installed, you can get console in 1600x1200! just pass vga=838 to kernel line in grub.
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Yes, I do run Gentoo on production servers...

adam23x · n00b Joined: 01 Oct 2003 Posts: 10

I too have noticed that the panel seems to have a memory leak. I am using version 4.0.4.