swap memory and load average

[yureka]

Hello everybody,
I have a desktop with 1 GB ram and 160 GB hard disk space. It has windows 7. I made a partition of 15 GB
hard disk space and a swap memory of 100 MB for fedora 14. But now fedora runs slow and has load averages more than 1 (around 1.2) . It also shows that hard disk has many bad sectors and harddisk may be failing. Is any of my alloted configuration wrong or is the swap memory less?? If so please help me out in this issue.
thanks in advance

[sea]

If 15gb is for the root partition "/", that should suffice.
As a suggestion however, i hope you have /home as another seperate partition, as this makes reinstall, fresh-install much, much less painfull.
I've never tried a swap with such a low value as 100 mb, the lowest i tried was 512mb swap, havent had any issues (performance) on my netbook, which has 1 gb ram as well.

I assume, that your performance loss is due to bad sectors on the hard disk, and probably 'short' disk spaces.

What is the output of:

df -m

Not sure if fsck can 'fix' bad sectors, but to run it, i'd suggest booting from a live media, and then run:

/sbin/fsck /dev/sdaX

Where sdaX refers to the linux-root or linux-home partitions.
Dont run it from an installed OS (mounted disks), as this may cause major damage!

[yureka]

Thanks...
The output of df -m is
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 14765 4642 9373 34% /
tmpfs 496 1 496 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7 34897 4773 30125 14% /media/New Volume
Can we increase the swap memory by any means? what does running from live media mean? What does above data mean? I am a new user and just a beginner. Thanks again..

[stevea]

The above list

/dev/sda5 14765 4642 9373 34% /
tmpfs 496 1 496 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7 34897 4773 30125 14% /media/New Volume

Says your root file system "/" is using 4642MB out of 14765MB and is only 34% filled.
Similarly your ' /media/New\ Volume' ' file system is 14%.

So you don't have any problem with filesystem space.

======

You can increase the swap. If you have extra space on your disk.
First see if you need to - run the 'free' command ....(if you post the result then use "go advanced" button and put it in code '#' section.to preserve spacing)

[stevea@hypoxylon Desktop]$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       7914076    2771232    5142844          0       3568     248724
-/+ buffers/cache:    2518940    5395136
Swap:      8925180     241120    8684060

So my system is using 241.120MB of swap out of a total of 8.925GB. No problems.
If Swap is getting towards full - that's a problem.


You can use 'gparted'
su -c " yum install gparted"
su -c gparted
to create a partition formatted as swap.
Then you can add the nrew partition (/dev/sda6 in this case) to fstab like .....
su -
<passwd>
echo "/dev/sda6 swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
exit
Then you'll have the new swap (plus the old one) available after reboot.

You can also edit /etc/fstab as root, but be careful !

==============

I suggest you load the 'htop' package and run the command of the same name to see what if anything is using your CPU time and memory space. The 'top' command is a little different version of the same idea. These are non-gui tools run in a terminal.