Does anyone else find that their Linux system is getting slower and slower? I've heard this complaint from people considering whether to switch over from Windows, but now I am experiencing it firsthand.

I use Mandrake 10.0-official with KDE. Program startups are becoming increasingly slower, with a protracted wait time. Printing (from whatever program: KWrite, Konq, etc.) pops up a dialog, but the printer selection takes as long as 10 seconds before it will find what my printers are. (And I only have one printer!) KJobViewer crashes constantly. The ARTSd sound server triggers a crash dialog every other day.

What on earth is going on? It didn't used to be this way in the beginning. Is there some maintenance that I'm failing to do? Is it because my log files are filling up or I need to do some garbage collection or something?

I don't even know where to start to look for why the bloody thing is so slow. I tried the "top" command as root, and stared in fascination at the changing display of "what program is eating up CPU time now?" but how exactly does that help me? Okay, so "kdeinit" is taking up a lot of time --but half of all programs in KDE are "kdeinit". I used "top -c" to see the commandline to no avail. And if "X" is slow --why? Why wasn't it before?

With Windows, you know it's because of spyware and trojans that bog down the computer, but what's going on with Linux? I hope I don't have to do something like hdparm to optimize my system or start overclocking.

Someone, help, please!

try out a couple things for me:
1) use a window manager like window maker or blackbox or whatever comes with mandrake. try doing the same tasks and using the same programs and see if the problem still occurs. that way, we'll know whether or not it is kde.
2) if it continues to happen in both kde and another wm, post the output of both "procinfo" and "ps aux" when it's being slow, so we can see what's going on.

Ive noticed the same. The output of ps aux doesnt matter because it doesnt show anything. Ive tried to trace it down, and havent figured it out. Ill issue the command to gedit something, and 5 minutes later it opens up.

"...is getting slower and slower"

I don't understand. Are you talking about:

1. Slower from version to version?
2. Slower on one session, few hours or days?
3. Months, using the same installation?

it seems like KWTm is talking about slower and slower on the same install, not on each session or from version to version.

if it's impossible to trace, there are only two solutions i can offer:

1) enable dma transfer mode
2) i hate to say this but... change distros - mandrake is a little bloated, but i'm sure there are ways to fix its bloatedness. remove software you don't use and disable certain services. changing distros shouldn't be necessary though.

either way, you should definitely take a look at this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=225232 - it's the exact same question you're asking and people are offering a lot of good solutions.

sorry if i couldn't help though.

THe first thing I do after installing my KDE distro in disable artsd... I find it is a cause of some stability and speed problems.

There is nothing wrong with mandrake that you can't tweak a little to fix. All the distros have some 'problem' in that they don't work just as you want them. Switching of artsd is a start... and with mdk 10 compiling a generic kernel and getting rid of automount cures most problems. As for resource hog, I have mdk9.2+KDE running fine on a P150 with 64meg ram, just turn off the eyecandy and so forth...

FC2 is okay, but then you still have to 'fix' it as well by adding things like mp3 and various codec support... Most of the distros will need tweaking to get them the way you want them... But I could not install FC2 on the old P150 as FC2 doesn't seem to support an install floppy for non-bootable cdrom machines, so that left mandrake os Slack...

Mandrake isn't so slow or bloated, there's just a few things to turn of after installation. KDE is the problem here, I'm using MDK10 w/XFCE4 and it is fast. Do we just have to accept the fact that KDE has become... bad?

Where did you get XFCE from? I never saw it on the package list for MDK 10, but I would surely give that a shot.

Setup ftp rpm sources with http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ and then just "urpmi xfce", or use the gui.

Which config file do I need to edit to do that?

Just go to the webpage I linked and choose distro version and servers. After that, open a console (as root) and copy/paste the commands from the webpage to the console.

Yes, I noticed my Mandrake 10 powered PC get slower these last few weeks... In my case it was noticeably slower (booting up to KDE after typing in the password and launching apps specially Mozilla) after I ran the lastest Mandrake Update which fixed pixbuf vulnerabilities.

I did post a thread previously about this (increasing sluggishness) but got no response. Note that I have Arts disabled.

Did that, and it says urpmi sources locked