Computer stalls

[Colin Law]

On 8 July 2014 15:48, rh <listen at singsang.at> wrote:
> I have two problems with my Ubuntu box.
> Fist one is, that sometimes there are continued disk ascesses for a long
> time (this may take ten or twenty minutes) whilst the computer is almost
> dead. I have tried to look with "top" if there are any processes which
> takes an unusual amount of time, buit i could not find anything.
>
> The second thing is that often there are very large Java scrips working
> in Firefox which paralyze the computer. Once I tried to download such a
> script. It was a huge unformated JS-file, unpossible to read or
> understand what it does.
>
> Has anyone an idea how I can find the cause of these Problems?

I wonder if you are running out of RAM and the system is having to
swap lots of stuff, resulting in disc thrashing.  How much RAM have
you got?  Less than 2GB is tight for Ubuntu with Unity.

Top will tell you how much swap you are using.  Normally this should
be small, possibly a few tens of megabytes.

Colin