OMG lots of processes
 

So my N800 was seeming a bit slow. I rebooted the tablet, and started xterm when it booted up. 103 (!!!!!!!!!!) processes running. WTF? My OS X machine only has around 60, my windows machine less than that, and my linux installs average around 30 at boot time. Why on earth would there need to be so many of them?

There is no `man` on the N800 so I have to look most of them up online, and get answers from users. Since like a lot of them (such as the 3 "browserd" process running) help 'speed up' launching of certain applications.

Has anyone here made a minimalist install on a N800? Or installed an entirely new linux OS?

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

triolus,

I completely agree. I personally want to free as much RAM as possible in favor of caching. But when I asked the same questions, I never received an answer other than disabling the metalayer-crawler.

That's it???? Man, there's got to be more.

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

I looked at it, and nothing really looks out of place or excessive. You have to realize that you've got a lot of processes that aren't really processes, but rather just kernel functions that have been broken out into individual PIDS for maintenance and tracking purposes. The rest deal with the desktop, WM, xwindow system and basic system maintenance. They're really not that memory intensive. At first boot, I'm using just under half my base memory, and that's only because I've got so bloody much loading. Even after several days and with a little polluted memory, at idle I'm still only consuming about 75% of memory. Given what it takes to run most apps, that's plenty of free ram to do whatever you need to. The only exceptions might be movie and music playing.

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

103 processes seems excessive...I have only 53 that appear to be running when the system is idle.

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

htop claimed 69 after i cleaned out a rogue modest and feedcircuit...

and given how libs are shared between processes, trying to keep as much ram free as possible are not really needed the way it seems to be in windows...

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

hi, im an xterm newb.

how do you display the processes via xterm?
and how do you kill these processes using the kill command?

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

ps -ax displays all processes
top displays which are most active, refreshing every second or two
ptop shows which are drawing the most power.

Re: OMG lots of processes
 

Are we counting running processes, or all processes? I was showing 105, then quit gpe-calendar and videocenter, and was then running ... 103.

My fedora 9 box shows 164 processes. The NIT shows the vast bulk of the processes are swapped out and in short-term sleep ("SW"). What does this all mean, anyway? If processes occupy a run slot, but are largely still paged out, it seems of little concern.

The VSZ of most of the processes are around 2400 (mostly hald-*-gpio stuff), though real programs are using a bit more (96K pages for videocenter - the pig). If the VSZ is small, why be bothered caring about (cheap) processes?