linux gets laggy?

zesty

well ive been playing with redhat 9.0 and every thing is nice but after like 3 programs are ran on the system its gets really laggy like theres no more ram left or something to proccess stuff
i have plenty of ram and a good proccessor

pc spec'e

thunderbird 1.4
384mb of pc133 sdram
20gig harddrive
ATI all in wonder 7800

it seems like things arnt turning off when i close them or something getting cought up in the proccesses i dont know reallymuch about linux i only use the linux to run test befor i do it on my web server
it runs fine when useing webmin or putty
it mite just be the graphical part i dont know any help would be nice

thanks

zach

stolzyboy

what programs are you using if you are only using it for a test webserver, are you developing on this box also, or on a win box and just testing it on the nix box before uploading to your host

zesty

the program that i have used or useing are vmware "dont really use that much" webmin and ssh and i connect to the box from putty

zesty

sorry i posted this in the worng spot :/

[edit]read the post below[/edit]

stolzyboy

i merged the threads for ya

bird_boy

I have RH 9 on the following system:
1.2 Gig Celeron
512 M
and multiple HDs.
It runs great. How often do you use vmware and what do you open...windows? If so what do you open under windows?

zesty

well i was just testing vmware seeing if i would get it to work with my noobie skills i dont use it the only thing i do on it is
connect though putty useing ssh but thats about it
the only reson why i installed vmware was that i was thinking about just running linux and useing vmware on my main box

thanks

zesty

nashirak

Just so you understand VMWare will slow your system down dramatically. It works by forming an a virtual machine in linux so please release that you have an extra layer of abstraction between you and the operating system and your machine will run a bit slower. Now on the issue of non-dying processes. What happens when you close everything out and then run ps -aux (should pullup process list). If you see any processes that are <defunct> those are most likely zombie processes that were killed of for some reason. You could also try running top and see what is taking up all the process time. My thoughts might be that X might not kill everything off. Simply try restarting X (CTRL-ALT-BKSPC) and see if things run a little smoother as a last resort.

Hope this helps a little.