Micro-lags/freezes every ~3 seconds under Xubuntu 8.04
 

Hi all,

I recently set up a PC from different old parts I picked up:
- Motherboard MSI MS-6309 v2.1 (Chipset VIA Apollo Pro 133A - Socket 370)
- Celeron 733
- 288 Mo SDRAM PC100
- Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
- CD player, PS/2 mouse & keyboard, ...

I've installed Xubuntu 8.04 without any problem, everything works "perfectly" (except the following problem) for Internet, music and video. But...

I have some kind of strange and extremely annoying issue: the system keeps lagging/freezing every approximately 3 seconds, during maybe 2 tenth of a second.

This seems to affect nearly everything running on the system: mouse moves, video & sound playback, etc. and makes any operation quite difficult to accomplish.

Something weird is that after trying to remove or deactivate the different components to check if the problem was not hardware related, I finally tried to boot on the LiveCD of Ubuntu 7.04, and this time the system ran perfectly.

So my questions are:
- Does someone know where the problem could come from?
- Is there a significant difference between Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04 and 8.04 that could cause this kind of behavior?

Thanks in advance.
(Forgive my English :) )

Use top command to find which app is sucking up resources.
Graphically there is a systemguard utility that shows the same data.
This will help pinpoint offending app.

This is what I tried, as well as looking at the logs and dmesg, but it doesn't seem to be caused by an application. I really don't know where it comes from.

Thanks for helping! Another idea?

I would next suspect insufficient RAM causing a lot of swapping. Check if the lags are accompanied by flashes of hard disk activity LED. Not sure if increasing swap partition size will help, but it is worth a try.

Hmmm it shouldn't be that either. Only 170MB are used in the RAM in normal activity.

But something related to the hard disk could explain why the LiveCD works without any problem and the installed OS doesn't. Maybe it is not as "fresh" as it should :)

Anyway, I also have Win98 on it and it works nice, even during games (Midtown Madness, Outlaws, Age of Empires, ...)

Thanks! I check this as soon as I can.