Excess processes

[J]

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:23 PM, John R. Sowden
<jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:
> I just noticed a lot of hd thrashing while was looking at a web page with tb
> running in a separate window (of course!).  I was surprised because this
> computer is running linux, not mswin.  I looked at the task manager and saw
> lots of processes running that were of either uk or of no interest to me.

what are uk processes?  English, Irish Scottish or Welsh?

> in task manager, what does rss mean.  What does the memory listed in the
> last column mean?  Is this ram in use now?  while watching, a line flashed
> red, an another line flashes yellow once in a while. what do those mean?

No idea, I don't run xubuntu, maybe someone more familiar can explain that

> there is no 'help' button.
>
> also, how ids i know what the process names mea/do, and can i get rid of the
> safely (in init.rd?)
> i am running xubuntu 13.04

Without knowing what you're actually running, hard to say.

Try running this from a terminal to get a file listing all running
processes at that moment:

ps auxf > process.list


Can't tell you what's causing this without that info.  It could be
anything from you don't have enough RAM to you've got too many
programs open at once causing the system to swap to disk to a run-away
program that's got a memory leak bug to many other things that cause
disk thrashing.