HELP! Linux is slowing to a crawl, what's wrong???
 

My system has a serious underperformance problem lately and I can't nail down what the problem is. I haven't introduced any new hardware into my system and I haven't tickered with my setup very much at all in the past 2-3 months or so. The problem seemed to happen after Thanksgiving and it feels like its getting worse. Sometimes I'll be running nothing but XMMS and the music will actually start skipping and when I look at my system monitor my CPU is peeking out at 100% usage!!! :confused: And I can hardly play Enemy Territory at all anymore because its so choppy and so many frames are skipped (I even set the grahpics settings to minimum and saw little benefit) Here's my setup:

Pentium IV 2.8GHz
1024MB RAM
120 GB HD
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

Debian sarge
Kernel 2.6.8
DE: Gnome

Here's a list of my processes (and my processor is showing really eratic behavior while running these, averaging around 30-40% usage and spiking all the way up to 95% and all the way down to 5% occasionally)


Does anyone have the slightest clue as to why this suddenly happened? It really sucks and its very frusterating. :cry: The only thing I can think of (and this is a long-shot) is that around June/July my CPU was damaged by overheating, which caused my machine to freeze up 60% of the time after I booted, but if the machine stayed stable for an hour after booting then it would never freeze up and I could keep it running for days. I don't think I've seen that freezing problem occur since my slow-down problem occured, but I'm not sure since I've only booted 2-3 times since then.

Please, someone lead me in the right direction to get my machine fixed. I don't want to imagine but could it be *gasp* spyware/a virus? (I almost exclusively install things from the Debian package system, so I highly doubt it...)

enable dma on your hard drive with hdparm, look through /var/log/messages for errors or warnings that could indicate hard drive failure. run top in a terminal, sounds like you are having some really high I/O wait times going on, you could have some faulty hardware run memtest on your system to check for bad memory.

I looked thru /var/log/messages, but there were no errors or warnings there. I highly doubt that its a problem with my hard disc, because my CPU usage is at 100% again right now and there is no activity from my hard drive (the access light isn't on). I don't have memtest on my system so I wasn't able to run that, but this system isn't very old at all and I'm not even using half of my available memory most of the time. Oh, now the usage just went from straight 100% back down to a somewhat-normal usage level. *sigh* what on Earth is going on here? :cry:

cpu usage
 

you said your cpu usage is at 100 but i dont see which program is using that much from your list...

cpu usage
 

i know this may not be of much help but i have had that problem on an XP box, turned out it was windows indexing service... aparently i had too much data for it to handle... i just switched it off and it was fine... i know this cant help you seeing as how it was windows but have you installed some type of program that databases your files?

Madamox is probably on to something, most distros have a cron job that tells them to execute updatedb every X hours/days/weeks/months/minutes/whatever you specify. It probably generated the cron job on it's own, and it usually executes every hour. When it does, it slows the system down a lot. Try poking around in your cron configs.

a couple of things (i don't use gnome)
it is possible something is misconfigured like in /etc/hosts or other network setup files
they discuss this some here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?postid=829250
also
if gnome saves session when you log out try turn that off and restart gnome
if a process goes rouge in the background it will come back if gnome saves session
also you are running lots of daemons - look for service logs and or daemon logs and look for errors
try cntrl - alt - F1 to look at the controlling tty for errors
once i had performance problem and one error message was scrolling by like crazy in controlling tty (ide-scsi was freeking out)
cntrl alt F7 to get back to X
both for performance in general and diagnosing your problem
i would try (just using the kill thing in the monitor program for starters)
turn off both atd and cron unless you are actually using them
i have also seen famd go all postal and everything will work ok without that as well so turn that off
gnunetd is running are you running some kind of file sharing server that needs that ? try stopping that
do you need sshd server ? try stopping that
check what you have running under inetd and check logs
also look at exim logs though i can't imagine that's the problem

Hmmm I see. Thanks for the help guys, I'll tinker around with things and see if I can't find the problem. And if I can't, you'll hear back from me. :p