I'm running Linux Mint on a Minibox Mini Pro 2 [only a couple weeks old], believe I may have installed it incorrectly, and noticed two times so far a severe lag, where one time it froze completely, and the other time, it slowed down considerably for about 20 minutes.

As it's new, and there's hardly anything on it, I had to presume someone got access to it because of possible wrong order while first setting everything up. Is there a way to look in my code for specific irregular lines?

Any and all help would be appreciated;
Linux is supreme.

-Much appreciation,
and of course with kindest regards

I guess you'd have to check via md5 or shal???

Might be that you are out of ram and using swap file a lot??

I had one OS BeOS that would test install but not sure why linux has never done that except for a few on first boot.

those bolded statements make it seem more likely that you are feeling the effects of system errors. have you checked any logs to see if they are telling you anything helpful?

Please tell us more about the specs of your computer.

There are also a number of utilities that might help you figure out what's going on.

In particular, top and htop can tell you what processes are using how many resources. Note that these are command line utilities; you will not find them on the menu.

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So I installed HTop, and the are literally t h o u s a n d s of processes seemingly running.
Is there any way to safely send a the list? Are you looking for anything in particular?

-Seriously appreciate the consideration and help

@Jefro...
I'm honestly not even sure what that means. :/
I can't imagine it being RAM though, because the only two times it happened, only a few lighter apps were running, and there's quite of bit of space, with hardly anything on it.

-Thanks

How would I do that,
and what would I be looking for?
Very few things on here, plenty of room, and nothing too out of the normal;
everything is seemingly up to date though. Only happened twice.

i think what the other suggestions as well as your responses point to is that your lack of familiarity with a newly installed operating system (which is totally understandable) on a new computer has lead you to diagnose the problem as malware/spyware which is more of a windows problem/typical diagnosis.

htop is a great place to start getting to know what your system looks like while it is running. you can configure it to show you about how much cpu and ram you are using among other things. feel free to leave it running while you go about other things and try to spend some time checking it every now and again to see what a normal load on your system is like.

frankbell also asked about your computer specs (specifications). knowing those will help people get an idea what your system is capable of in relation to running mint. at a minimum knowing what kind of cpu and how much ram you have will be helpful.

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Thanks for the advise--there are thoouuussaannnds of things active though. Where would I even start?
Also: Am I looking for anything in specific among the thousands of things? H a h.
Specs--not sure what you're asking about in truth.

-Seriously appreciate the help guys

if you don't know what you are looking at, then telling which among those many many things is out of the ordinary will be pretty much impossible.

specifications refer in general to the system components that are used in your computer. things like your CPU and RAM among plenty of other things. mint has a system details program. after you open the menu, if you start typing "system info" (without the quotes) it will find the program for you.

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Something to note, because I had to 'figure it out' too at one time, htop does not display running processes in the same way as Windows Task Manager (and to a lesser extent the OS X equivalent, the name of which escapes me). That is, it shows what command is lined-up to a specific PID, whereas Windows Task Manager shows things at the 'application' level, and rolls up all of the PIDs/commands into a single 'application' like 'Internet Explorer' or 'Winamp' (which actually represents more than just 'one' if you view the expanded processes/performance information). If you switch htop to the 'tree' view this can help sort out what exactly is going where (hit F5 to switch to Tree - you can also collapse 'up' to tasks with F6). Seeing 500-600 threads (of which most are not actively running) is pretty typical on my Xubuntu and Ubuntu boxes, and this is also (Believe it or not) pretty typical in Windows too ('total threads' is shown in the Performance tab of Task Manager - I know OS X can also report this but I am blanking on which tab it is; OS X can also have htop installed).

I'm not saying you do or do not have a 'virus' but just seeing 'relatively a lot' of things in htop is by itself not an immediate cause for concern, especially if the CPU load is very low (for example, ransomware will generally produce a fairly large CPU load as it works to encrypt your data, malware crypto-miners tend to produce huge CPU and GPU loads as they hash, etc).

For reference, I googled "Minibox Mini Pro 2" from the original post, and discovered its an SBC computer. You can read more about it here: https://fit-iot.com/web/product/mbm2-pro/
Overall this looks like a fairly low-spec/low-power machine, so performance hangs depending on the workload may just be part of the experience - it's probably perfect for 'light' workloads but if you're expecting this to run 3D games, do heavy transcoding work, etc it will likely be a less than ideal experience.


What specifically were you doing (and what do you consider 'lighter apps') when the slow-downs happened? How much memory is actually reported as available (e.g. not 'used')? Can you install psensor and see if the CPU is perhaps overheating/throttling during these slow-downs?

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Rather than using the command line, it may be easier to use a gui tool to examine processes. Look in the menu for a name referring to "tasks" or "monitor". You can get things listed by the amount of memory they use, or their CPU load, and you get a general statement of total load.

One command-line tool that is simple is free, that will simply show if you are low on memory or using swap.

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If I sent the shorter list from System Manager,
would someone be able to go through it, and see if anything was amiss?

-Much appreciation again

Is this your computer?

https://fit-iot.com/web/product/mbm2/

Does it have 8 GB RAM?

IF so, on Amazon there is one critical review where there was a noticeable lag when programs "needed a bit of CPU power" The Quad Core Intel Celeron J3455 is not the speediest CPU so what programs are you running?

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No, you need to look at the output in time.
It really isn't hard to figure it out - you can sort processes (running programs) by how much CPU or RAM or disk I/O they use. If you use a graphical systemmonitor, it's just a question of clicking the table headers.
Once you figure out if something is eating so much resources that it could be responsible for a freeze, share that with us by all means!
But just dumping some list here without context is meaningless.

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