Running multiple applications

[bsterix]

Sometimes if i try to start an application (e.g. x-term, mplayer-GUI, browser, nailclient) nothing happens except the small box in the upper right corner "loading..". No error-message or so, just no applicationstart. Mostly this happens, when some other apllications are already running.
When i close some or all of them it sometimes works again.


Memory should not be the problem, the CPU-Load and Memory-icon doesnt show the memory to be full.

Any ideas?

Are there any easy possibilietes of tuning the system?
The virtual-memory (64MB) is enabled.


Thanks
bsterix

[mwiktowy]

This only seems to happen to me when the application isn't starting up for some reason (crashed, error, OOM killer clobbers it). You can see if anything illuminating gets spit out to stderr onto the xterm by starting the application on the command line.

Maybe the memory usage spikes so fast and the OOM watchdog kills it so quickly that the CPU/Mem monitor just doesn't have a chance to update so it looks like nothing happened. Having said that, I have to open a fair number of applications before things start dying and things not working is usually accompanied by a message about running out of memory.