Sudden and Unusual slowness, esp. Firefox, on my Centos5.7 desktop using KDE desktop
 

For the last week my Centos5.7 desktop (which I update daily) is processing very slowly with lots of freezes, although it does do "catchups" every four minutes or so. In Firefox it is half the speed it was a few weeks ago and the flash games which I enjoy on Facebook are and agony with slowness and crashes,some will not load at all. The operating system is not comfortable for me I spent years using windows but this bears no resemblance. I am especially new to "compiling". Until this installation of the tablet I got by nicely just adding in needed program files using Yum or rpm packages. What can I do to speed my system up and smooth out the processing? How can I find if it is the network configuration or memory management which is the problem?

I'd appreciate any insights you might have, bearing in mind I am a novice in this system.

there's a good chance your system is swapping (i.e. using disk to extend ram capacity at the expense of speed).

to check this possibility, as well as as other options, please post the output of the following command:

top 20:02:03 up 22:50, 3 users, load average: 1.44, 1.39, 1.66 Tasks: 168 total, 3 running, 165 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 98.3%us, 1.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 386048k total, 379700k used, 6348k free, 8744k buffers Swap: 917496k total, 105080k used, 812416k free, 216048k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 18695 aletta 15 0 256m 80m 24m S 96.0 21.4 9:32.64 firefox 7047 root 15 0 102m 12m 2756 R 1.0 3.3 2:19.02 Xorg 19045 aletta 15 0 49728 16m 12m R 1.0 4.3 0:00.86 konsole 18942 aletta 15 0 31972 13m 10m S 0.7 3.5 0:06.67 ksysguard 18943 aletta 15 0 2828 1196 792 S 0.7 0.3 0:04.41 ksysguardd 4432 aletta 15 0 16456 6816 2072 S 0.3 1.8 0:17.05 artsd 1 root 15 0 2176 332 308 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.36 init 2 root RT 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0 3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0 4 root RT 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 5 root 10 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.23 events/0 6 root 10 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper 7 root 10 5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread

seems to have lost the formatting: does this help? I am using Konqueror to post this, Firefox just freezes constantly and I am out o extension to turn off. Is there a way to adjust the swap file?

Since this post I've upgraded to Centos 6.2 and added in a gig and a half more memory and it is no longer slow.