from s
First kill the Beryl. See how big a difference that makes.
Next, for safety’s sake, check your dmesg and /var/log/messages to make sure you don’t have a physical problem (like a bad sector on your drive). I’d then run top and sort by memory usage (shift-m) and keep that running in the background. I’d disable all unecessary services (like httpd).
Don’t expect much for bling on that system if you actually want to get work done. I was on a 586 laptop with 128M ram for a while and XFCE was the solution. I however, did have to do some things to trim down ram usage that I didn’t have to do on a machine since I was running a 200Mhz slackware server. A very good start is to look up suggestions for increasing battery life on a linux laptop–basically, doing things like disabling syslog and any other services (updatedb, beagled) that constantly access your disk in the background help a lot. I also saved a lot of ram by turning off scrollback buffers in my rxvt’s and xterms. Gnome-Term gobbles *titanic* amounts of ram for a shell, and if you go transparent-background with it, that’s the bed you made. Ram ain’t free.
The next most important thing is habits: if you’re used to browsing with a 36 tabs open in firefox, you’re going to swap constantly. You might look into firefox settings like “free memory on minimize”. Other browsers might actually use less ram than FF, check that out. Thunderbird and Evo take *titanic* ram if you’ve got dozens of accounts and thousands of messages. Squirrelmail was the fastest way to read my mail on my cut-down laptop, actually.
Other ways of managing ram is to–once you’ve cut down the services you don’t actually need, configure the ones you use to have short connection timeouts and not to start a bazillion copies. Like Amavis and SpamAssassin and imapd. You can force these to run just one process and not 10, because you’ve prolly only got one other person accessing your server.
I’ve had problems with Beryl pegging my CPUs on 1.7Ghz laptop, I finally just gave it up. I couldn’t get the cpu scaling to reduce the clocking because something in Beryl was polling, which chewed my battery real quick. So I just gave that up. I love Beryl, but it doesn’t actually help me work faster (even tho I’d like to think it does). The same theory goes for desktop applets…gkrellm and docklet thingies spend cycles, too. Go back to top and see what’s hogging your system.
I’m surprised that I was so productive for so long with a 200Mhz with 256M ram. I lived out of fvwm2 and had like eight desktops filled with rxvt windows (but just one browser session) almost all the time. I also had a dedicated modem line. That rocked!
