slow karmic system

[Gary Jarrel]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:
> I have, actually from the beginning I installed Karmic problems which
> seem to be related to disk access.
> System: AMD Phenom II (4-core) 4 GB mem; large HD.
> Looking at gkrellm I see that I have 1,6 GB free and 6,7GB of 8 GB free
> swap space.
> Nevrtheless the system constantly messes on the HD and I see the HD led
> practically continuously on. I have Vmware running with only 1 xp guest
> and of course when backup-c is active there is a lot of HD-traffic.
> I cannot understand why for simple tasks like opening gedit and even now
> when I'm typing the system sometimes freezes for several seconds and
> after that I can type on.
> After a reboot, the system is much quicker and "alerter" but after a few
> days (the system is now > 5 days up) it slows.
> I've read somewhere that there is something like a "swappiness" factor
> that can be set but I have no idea what that means and I would very much
> understand what I do as I don't like to follow recipes without knowing
> the rationale.
> Hope somebody can give me some clues.
> Joep
>
> --

I noticed exactly the same thing on my machine with Core i7 and 6GB
RAM. gEdit would be painfully slow, Eclipse takes ages to open, seems
ok after a restart but as time goes on the machine starts to slow
down. If I run up VM exactly the same thing happens.

If anyone has any pointers that would  be much appreciated.

Gary