How do I troubleshoot a lagging system?
 

I have a laptop with SL6 installed on it.

If I run 'top' i can see that the whole system just sticks/freezes for a moment here and there. The mouse becomes unresponsive during this time, *everything* freezes for a moment.

I've put 'top' on with an interval of .1, and there isn't a particular program hitting the top of this list when it happens.

How do I troubleshoot this? Thanks.

If that's the case, I would suspect you are hanging on hard disk access for some reason. Post your hardware and in particular how your hard drives are configured eg PATA, SATA, Raid, etc. I experienced similar problems in the past with PATA hard drives connected to a PCI IDE controller card. I assume you have adequate ram and are not going into swap.