Hello! My system runs on debian wheezy with kde for almost a year now. It has all the updates until now. I use my system mainly for web browsing, emailing, playing music and some other basic office related tasks. Really not a high-end user I may say.
The problem is that my system gets slower and slower and before investing in new hardware I would really like to know if there is some things I can do to clean it up. The thing is, I don't know where to start. The problem gets worse if I open iceweasle with flash or java. Sometimes it takes minutes to load pages with much graphics. Any help much appreciated!

Post the output of:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use Mounted on
rootfs 33G 9.4G 22G 31% /
udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
tmpfs 99M 840K 98M 1% /run
/dev/disk/by-uuid/5b7894c0-eaa6-4857-8f0a-fff06da22800 33G 9.4G 22G 31% /
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 960M 7.5M 953M 1% /run/shm
/dev/sda6 38G 26G 11G 71% /home

there are some entries of NFS mounted disks left out

I'm not sure why your system is slowing down; I thought that maybe your drive was full but clearly that is not the case.

Debian wheezy should not slow down over time. That behaviour would be expected in Windows but not Debian.

Do you track your memory usage at all? Is that very high?

Have you tried browsing with javascript disabled? Either disable it from about:config or try the "noscript" add-on.

First, many thanks for yr reply HOAS.
No, disk space is clearly not the problem here. I switched from Windows to Debian years ago because I was tired of reinstalling my system every half year

Unfortunately I need javascript. Disabeling it will stop some sites to work, so this is not an option.
I also found out that my system swaps regularly and memory is almost constantly above 80%. It has 1 GB, so I think I need to pay the hardware store a visit...
Do you think expanding mem will do the trick?

Yes, definitely.

KDE is quite "heavy" in respect of memory usage.

Rather than buy more memory, you could try a "lighter" desktop -- LXDE has the lowest memory requirement of any full desktop environment* and is very usable; XFCE is only slightly more demanding and is almost as full-featured as KDE.

I tend to prefer bare-bones pure window manager environments and these use less memory again -- even in my 8GiB 64-bit laptop, DWM uses 87MiB...

https://flexion.org/posts/2014-03-me...ironments.html

Because your install has slowed down it would be good to know why. Thus the suggestion to disable java. This doesn't need to be a permenant thing.

You can check your memory usage with and with out it enabled and see if that is the differenc.

Have you run the complicated command, as user;
This will give you lots of information on what applications are using memory.

You have to admit, though, that there no publically released, with radio play (a while back anyway) songs about reinstalling Gnu/Linux as there was with Reinstalling Windows. What an honor it was to use an OS that was inspiration to a song writer.

browsing with javascript enabled decreases performance dramatically, but as said before, I need it so frequently, disabling is not an option.
After some further investigation, I will do the following
- expand physical memory from 1 GB to 3 GB
- switch to xfce because of the better prformance over kde
But, I have never installed a new display manager over an existing one, I found a short guide on the debian site, so my last question will be: is there a clear walkthrough to install xfce over kde?
Many thanks so far

Then select "XFCE4 Session" from KDE.
https://wiki.debian.org/Xfce#Install...stalled_system

If you run KDE with less than 2GB of memory you'll often find your system like frozen because it started swapping.

Check top and the %wa in the 3rd line. If it shows a percentage over 2% you are suffering swapping.

If the system became slowly slower, check your web browser. They get heavier and heavier and they script complete applications.

Like someone else siad, KDE does not get slower over time all by itself.

jlinkels

i have now 3 GB internal memory and the replacement of kde with xfc been done. I will test performance for a while but so far it has never been so good.
Many thanks for all the help!