I had left some file manager windows open on my Linux web server for a few days and they were consuming my memory. I only had two file manager windows open! I'm using the Gnome desktop and the file manager's name is Nautilus. I just recently started using the file manager in Linux. Nice point and click and I can get around with the mouse only while doing something on another system. I always end up doing all my file manipulation with the standard UNIX type commands I know but was liking the idea of navigating just to look at what files were in a specific directory.
What happened was I noticed that updating the blog was slow as well as just navigating to my site pages. The first thing you do of course is login on the web server to run the "top" command. Well CPU was just fine. I then figured it must be memory. Now since I have been playing mainly with HPUX the last few years I started running commands like "swapinfo" and they just were not there. I then brought up the system monitor and looked at the list of processes and bingo there was "nautilus" hogging up all of the memory. I then shutdown the file manager windows forcibly and memory issue resolved therefore sluggish web server issue resolved! Now to look for some updates on this "nautilus" or find another file manager or perhaps try another desktop like "KDE" instead of "Gnome"
This incident also further reminds me I need to build another or upgrade this web server
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