Computer slows down the longer it stays on.

wilsonsamm · 11-26-2007, 06:52 PM

Hello.
I have the unfortunate problem that my computer is slowing down the longer I leave it on.
My current uptime is 1 day and seven hours, and my processor usage is 99%. Any ideas on why this could be happening? htop shows that X, opera (my browser), and amarok are taking the most oompf from the cpu, but they weren't that processor hungry a day and seven hours ago.

Anyone knows how to fix this?

SciYro · 11-26-2007, 07:21 PM

X is relatively light on resources, i have trouble thinking its X's problem. Other programs that use X, however, can cause it to eat more and more resources, firefox comes to mind (just a example). Look for the programs that are using the most memory, because it sounds much like a memory leak to me.

matthewg42 · 11-26-2007, 08:11 PM

Try killing off each of these program in turn to see if there is a single culprit. I've had problems with both amarok and firefox in the past hoging a lot of resources.

salasi · 11-27-2007, 04:18 AM

I've got a similar problem. these days my max uptime is a day or two, where I was in the habit of leaving this box going for a month or two between reboots (and even then the reboots were usually caused by me needing to check that everything started up correctly after some change to a service).

In this respect, I agree with the other posters; it is most likely to be a memory leak problem. In my case, I can see Opera eating more and more memory as time goes on. Just in case you think its specifically an Opera problem, I've also tried with konqueror and firefox and get the same results, it just takes a bit more time. Equally, akregator seems to have quite a memory footprint and that is probably making matters worse, but I have to read RSS feeds somehow.

In fact, if I use ksysguard I can actually see the memory in use growing, albeit quite slowly. Equally, once it has gone 'bad', I see lots of hard disk activity as it tries, unsuccessfully, to swap its way to freedom.

My guess is that somewhere in the underlying libraries I have a memory leak, and this is a library that has been upgraded in an update process. Now, if I knew which one...

In practise, I'll rebuild the box sometime soon.