System slowed down tremendously.
 

I'm running Linux Mint 15. All of a sudden about a week or so ago my system has started crawling. When the screen shuts off from power save, and then comes back on it takes a long time for the icons to re-appear. The panel shows, then one applet, then another and so on. Finally all the desktop icons appear.

It doesn't only happen when the screen shuts off either.

I opened the system monitor when this was happening and nothing is causing the CPU% to go up to anything higher than like 12%. If firefox is running, I often get an "Unresponsive Script message". I know the website is fine, this message is only appearing when the system in general is running very slow (all programs -- the whole system).

The computer is more than powerful enough and was running beautifully for 6mo - 1yr. It's got 6GB of RAM.

Any idea's on how I can figure out what is causing this?

FYI - I don't run any virus software. Do you think I could have picked up a virus?

Graphics card going kaput?

Also, you said you've looked at CPU usage, but have you looked at swap or RAM usage while this is occurring?

Yes, the swap is 221MB and the RAM stays level on the graph. No spike at all.

As for the graphics card, not sure, it is just an onboard video card. No proprietary drivers at all. The only thing used on this computer is internet really. No games.

Is there a way that I can test the onboard graphics card?

I'd check that you have internet connectivity and that your DNS resolver is correct. No DNS causes very slow startups and general slowness on my Fedora laptop.

How do I check that? Also, the internet connectivity works. If I reboot the computer and then go into Firefox it will work again normally and then slow down again in a bit.

I was thinking that maybe the hard drive was going??

If it works initially after a reboot it's probably not a DNS problem then. If you want to check anyway, I usually just do something like dig www.yahoo.com from a command prompt and make sure DNS provides the answer.

There are SMART reporting tools that can identify a failing hard drive, but I don't know how to run them in Mint, sorry.

The www.website.com definitely works.

What are the name of those tools and I can read up on them?

For harddisk diagnosis you need to install smartmontools, then run to get the diagnostic output. You may also want to have a look at the temperatures, install lm_sensors and then use to detect the sensors and to get the output of temperature sensors.

Also, Mint 15 went EOL in January, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade to a supported version.

Here is the output for the smart diagnostics. Can someone please let me know if there is a problem with anything?

http://pastebin.com/x3yYTZs0

That does not look good. It "passed" the assessment, but the read error rate, seek error rate, and reallocated sector count are all worrisome.

So does that mean a re-format is in order or that it is likely a mechanical failure? Could that be causing the delays?

I was thinking that it could be a hardware issue. Is there a way that I can tell if the hard drive is maybe going into sleep mode and then coming out and causing problems?

Those errors can't be fixed by a format, the drive is dying. There's no way to know how much longer it will last, but once you start seeing sector reallocations it usually goes down hill pretty fast.

Okay... Will pick up a new hard drive, re-install and I know that will solve the problem for sure. LOL

Thanks for the help!