Why is Linux always sleeping on me?

[adam1mc]

I'm new to Linux.

I have issues with Mozilla and other programs just coming to a screeching halt. Today I opened my System Monitor to find all my programs 'sleeping' and of course nothing is responsive. Just like with Windows, a reboot seemed to fix it.

Why is linux asleep on me?

img141.imageshack.us/img141/8863/processesallsleeping.png
{that is the image, but I'm disallowed from posting the image into the forum}


Oh.. And the memory usage on Mozilla slowly starts to creep upwards. Anyone know why that happens? Look at it. 1.5GB and I didn't have much of anything open. Just a few webpages and a few instances of cnbc stock prices which refresh stock quotes every minute.

[egan]

That's the way the processess should be. They aren't doing anything, so they are sleeping. At least that is what is displayed in my system monitor.

As for Firefox memory usage, that drives me crazy too. I think the main reason is that it caches your history in RAM so that when you click back, it can quickly load the page. I used to read a really large development log every day, but later replaced it with a program to only get the latest entries. Nowadays, with Vimperator I get around 30-200MB memory used.