Giant Xorg and Performance Issues

[Loren M. Lang]

I have had various performance issues on FreeBSD since I installed 5.2.1
a few months back.  Basically, it seems that it's easy to load the
system down enough to interrupt xmms playing music which is very bad for
me.  I'm wondering if 5.2.1 has had lower performance levels than the
4.x line.  I've recently upgraded to 5.3-BETA7 and noticed only slight
improvements.  I usually just run fvwm2 with gkrellm, xmms, and lot's of
xterms so I wouldn't think my system should have much issue with that.
It's a Pentium3 Celeron 600Mhz with 128 Megs of ram, is my system just
under spec?

Running a portupgrade in the background usually renders the system
unusable for playing music and even running mozilla can sometimes slow
the system enought to interrupt the sound.

Also, I noticed the following in top:

46142 root      96    0 67268K 24576K RUN      8:04  1.07%  1.07% Xorg
45853 sttng359  96    0 30548K 12112K select   0:35  0.00%  0.00% Xorg

Both Xorg servers are logged in as a regular user, the first server was
started from kdm and the second from startx.  The first one is running
my usual fvwm desktop and the second is running kde for a test.  Why
does the server run from kdm take more ram even with a light desktop?
Could my performance problems be related to this causing my system to
swap a lot?  But even 30 megs for Xorg seems a lot to me since I've run
X with fvwm+xterm on a laptop with 48 megs of ram just fine.

-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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