i gots a nice looking linux box on my home network... i'm not a pro or anything but i managed to get apache, samba, sshd, and not i just got imap and pop3 working on my computer. sounds great right?

well here the thing.. i like to use my linux box while ssh'd in from my windows comp, between putty, winscp, and samba i can pretty much do anything in either windows or linux. the problem is when i use putty or do a lot of file swapping using samba or whatever the linux computer starts to run really really slow.

when i switch over and just use it at the enlightenment desktop it runs fine, except apache and ssh, which both run slow still (i dunno how to test samba from within linux) . i can do almost anything for any amount of time from the desktop with no problems. its jstu when i use my daemons/services that things start to run really really slow.

its the freeking weirdest thing. they just start to run annoyingly slow and i either have to restart the computer (which sometimes does not fix it) or just walk away from the computer and come back in a few days.

anyone heard of anything like this, or know of anything i can try to fix this. any help would be great, i am really stumped on this one.

(oh yeah) - madrake 9.0, and i dont even know what version of all my software i got (apache2 of some sort) - not that i think it matters, i've changed all the versions and nothing changed.

It chould be any number of things from hardware errors to not enough RAM. Run the following
vmstat 1 > /tmp/vmstat.info;
While trying to do what ever slows you machine down. Then post the output. Vmstat gives isummary nfo on cpu use,disk perf, interrupts, memory. This is the place I would start with. Also check for any errors at the end of the kernel log
tail -n 100 /var/log/messsages;
Check for network card errors
ifconfig;