What is hammering my memory?

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 2 July 2010 17:11, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
>> The Linux kernel. It's normal. Most of your chewed up memory is taken up
>> by the page cache. Nothing to worry about. The kernel will automatically
>> free up memory as needed. The page cache attempts to save you from
>> having to operate at hard disk speed (milliseconds) as opposed to RAM
>> speed (microseconds) so if you want a culprit, it is the kernel. If you
>> are really not happy about it using memory, set swappiness to zero.
>>
> 
> I'll ask a different question, then. What could be causing the system
> to be so sluggish? I see nothing in top that looks to be a hog.
> 

Now that one is a hard one to answer.

Is it GTK apps? KDE apps calling GTK apps/dialogs? Switching desktop 
spaces or windows?

Those could be caused by dbus troubles or other stuff and they are hard 
to track down. Right now, I have a problem with sudo. It works not too 
long after start up but afterwards, it stops working. All I can say is, 
all these random problems are making me more and more inclined to run 
something else other than Ubuntu.

So, where and when do you encounter sluggishness again?