computer slowing greatly

[Clay Weber]

On Sunday, July 17, 2011 02:43:17 PM Ronnie Tucker wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Is there a way to see what was last running and possibly screwing up my
> last KDE session before the last power down?
> 
> Just randomly my computer will slow down to where it looks like the
> pointer is moving at about 2fps. I can't click anything, and if I press
> caps lock on/off it takes several seconds before it registers on my
> keyboard light. When it happens I'm not running anything I wouldn't
> normally be running, and it's completely random. Sometimes it won't
> happen for days, but some days (like today) it'll happen several times.
> Hence my email.  :D  In the end I have to just power off the machine as
> I can't type/click so can't log out or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.
> 
> Any ideas/tips would be most welcome.
> 
> Thanks!
> Ronnie
A couple suggestions I have found:

This may depend on which version/kernel you have, but I found that my laptop 
was for some reason hitting the swap hard, even though I was only using a 
little more than half my ram. The hard d rive was bogged down by this, 
bringing everthing to a crawl just as you desescribe. I believe this happend 
to me in Natty. I fixed it by adjusting the swappiness settings as described 
here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What is swappiness and how do I 
change it?

Now, I have since done a clean install, and there has been a kernel update 
since the last time i had this problem, but I have not had the slowdown in 
some time, and I have not adjusted the swappiness either.


Another place it could be, depending on the vintage of your hardware, is the 
Strigi file indexing if your systtem is older..

-- 
Clay Weber
http://kubuntuforums.net
http://ubuntumaine.org
http://emacdogsports.com