I am experiencing extremely long run times and 'less' and 'man' taking minutes before anything is displayed on the screen with my Ubuntu install. The software clock looses track of time (passing only a few minutes an hour), SSH login is a long wait for the password prompt, in short everything seems to slow down. The sluggishness starts after a period of hard work (a job running a couple of minutes) and goes away with a reboot.

Colleagues of mine with identical hardware are not experiencing similar problems (so it does not seem to be a compatibility issue) but the machine is a dual-core IBM Thinkcentre.

Two installations of SuSE 9.3 and recently Ubuntu still hasn't solved the problem.

Does anyone have a suggestion? I surface scanned the harddrive without result and I don't believe I am running anything peculiar (the recent Ubuntu install is almost unmodified except for the addition of an SSH server).

Thanks!

Newer operating systems tend to have higher overhead. I'm not too sure on that about SuSE or Ubuntu--they're both improving phenomenally in performance.

My slowest machine at home is running Debian. It works fairly well; certainly better than others. That's what I recommend to you--the latest Debian with minimal GUI packages.

Make sure you're not running an FTP server or HTTP server if you don't need it. Nevertheless, sshd is useful though so keep that.

Thanks for your reply. I realise it's a tough question to answer ...

I looked into the cpu issue again and I still don't think that should be a limitation. My processor is a Pentium 2.6GHz, which should be enough, I suppose. Also, I'm only using it from SSH, which should limit the GUI overhead (I also tried shutting down X completely, and it didn't make a difference). Finally, the sluggishness only sets in after a heavy job has finished - until then everything runs smoothly.

However, it's more than a little puzzling that SuSE reported two cores on this machine, when there is only one (Ubuntu seems to realise this).