🚀 go-pugleaf

Beartooth wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 8 May 2002, Tiny Human Ferret wrote:
> 
> > Beartooth wrote:
> > >
> > >         Recently, whenever I boot up -- and often when I
> > > give some command -- the computer makes fervent whirring
> > > noises, and keeps the little red light either blinking fast,
> > > or on continuously (perhaps there are blinks so fast I can't
> > > see them), but without doing anything visible.
> >
> > Well --
> >
> > once you get it up and running, try the following:
> >
> > ps auwx
> >       Will let you know all of the processes running, as a rule.
> 
>         OK, first step: looking through the output shows that a
> whole bunch of the ones with higher numbers all involve things of
> the form:
> 
> [...] --sm-config-prefix /[....]
> 
> -- but surely a configuration is something you set and then let
> be? (at least till you think of another setting)
> 
>         For a while, my initial startx was getting me a window
> designed to take some sort of configuration; I made it go away, I
> thought by closing it.
> 
>         Do I want to make it refrain from starting all these
> --sm-config-prefix processes? If so, what is a way I can follow
> to do that?

No. [sorry for the delay... fish to fry in news:alt.politics.immigration ]

Those are Nautilus/Gnome applets, they are essential for the graphic user
interface. I am not very happy with Nautilus, myself, and don't use it, but
I don't know how to tell you to ditch it. But as long as you're running it,
you'll need those. 

An output from a typical invocation of `top` (note the uptime):

  7:11pm  up 211 days,  3:31,  2 users,  load average: 1.11, 1.07, 1.01
57 processes: 54 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.2% user,  0.0% system,  0.2% nice,  0.2% idle
Mem:    30052K av,   23944K used,    6108K free,    7644K shrd,    4028K
buff
Swap:  528184K av,   26696K used,  501488K free                    8880K
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
18891 genomeat  20  19 22140 4276   580 R N     0 92.8 14.2  3077h
ghclient.x
15567 root       4   0  1312 1312  1112 R       0  7.3  4.3   0:00 top
    1 root       0   0    60   40    32 S       0  0.0  0.1   0:08 init
    2 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:22 kflushd
    3 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   1:02 kupdate
    4 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:00 kpiod
    5 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   6:26 kswapd
  183 root       0   0   156    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:01 cardmgr
  236 root       0   0   284  232   196 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:59 syslogd
  247 root       0   0   496    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:01 klogd
<blah foo bar yadda snip>


PID	= Process ID number. Assigned sequentially as the process starts.

PRI	= Priority -- can be adjusted with `nice` or `renice`.

NI	= "Niceness". A program with a 'niceness' level of 20 will not execute as
long as anything else wants to execute. A program with a 'niceness' level of
-20 will execute before any other process, unless those other processes have
also got a niceness of -20, which is not very nice to other programs at all,
hence the negative number for negative niceness. A program with a niceness
of 20 is excessively nice, and should only be so nice when it's extremely
unimportant.

Size	= Size. 

I'm a trifle hazy on the rest, or a trifle lazy about writing it up. See
`man top`; however, I can mention that %CPU is "percentage of CPU useful
cycles being used on this process" and %MEM means what you think it means,
"percentage of memory used on this process". TIME is how long the process
has been running in terms of actual clock time in execution. Note
ghclient.x; it's been crunching genome for a long time, 128 days total time
on CPU though actually it's been running longer than that. 

If you're having problems, you will want to look at SIZE, %CPU and %MEM to
see if there are huge memory or CPU hogs. Then read the man page for that
process, and see if it's something that you actually need running. If you
don't, kill it. 

-- 
    Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae.
Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth:  Meow. <-----> http://earthops.net/klaatu/