Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

Declan · 2010-05-17 05:36:19

Hi guys. Sometimes I'll come back to my computer after a few hours of being away, and my screensaver (electric sheep) will be incredibly laggy, just shifting a lot rather than doing its smooth normal thing. Then I'll unlock it, so the screensaver is off and I'm back to my desktop, and it will be still be really laggy and slow (ie, minimizing windows, moving the mouse around, or other general stuff) despite me having no heavy programs running. Then I'll do "top" to see what's causing it:

As you can see, gnome-terminal is running high (with top) and Xorg is taking a bunch. And this is lower than normal, actually. You can see that amarok is actually taking very little, so it's something else.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Soumyadeep · 2010-05-17 05:41:08

Check if antialiasing is enabled for the terminal which may cause that high cpu usage by it and X.

Declan · 2010-05-17 06:00:46

I suppose it's possible, but to be honest gnome-terminal wasn't open when I got to the comp, I opened it to use top and see what was doing it.

Soumyadeep · 2010-05-17 06:51:33

maybe a graphic card/driver issue? what's ur card/driver?

ewaller · 2010-05-17 15:24:25

How about a memory leak causing page faults?

What does 'free' show?

Edit: Never Mind, somehow I had missed the 'Top' output.

What is the disk doing? Any signs of I/O errors in the logs?

Last edited by ewaller (2010-05-17 15:26:05)

whitethorn · 2010-05-19 15:10:49

and can you also check

df -h

I once had a program that whenever I left it on for a while it would *spam* my home partition and the computer was laggy as hell. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was.

Declan · 2010-05-22 06:15:33

whitethorn wrote:

and can you also check
df -h
I once had a program that whenever I left it on for a while it would *spam* my home partition and the computer was laggy as hell. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was.

I have a good 14GB left in my home partition...what do you mean spam it? As in, produce tons of output like textfiles or something?

Declan · 2010-05-22 06:18:28

Soumyadeep wrote:

maybe a graphic card/driver issue? what's ur card/driver?

Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M. My driver is just nvidia.

rransom · 2010-05-25 06:31:17

I've had seemingly random slowdowns on a newly installed Arch system, particularly when writing a large directory tree with lots of small files to disk. I suspect my issue is the partition-misalignment problem described at http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/advice.html#alignment.

Please post the contents of /proc/scsi/sg/device_strs, and the output of the following parted commands:

unit s
print

EDIT: A copy of /proc/scsi/sg/device_strs is redundant; parted will print the model number of the disk it is operating on.

Last edited by rransom (2010-05-25 06:40:29)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-17 05:36:19

Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#2 2010-05-17 05:41:08

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#3 2010-05-17 06:00:46

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#4 2010-05-17 06:51:33

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#5 2010-05-17 15:24:25

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#6 2010-05-19 15:10:49

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#7 2010-05-22 06:15:33

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#8 2010-05-22 06:18:28

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

#9 2010-05-25 06:31:17

Re: Computer mysteriously slows down like crazy, top reveals nothing

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