I'm currently in the midst of a search for a Distro to settle on. I'm an old hand with Slackware, and like it well enough, but have been dabbling with Ubuntu as well, and am impressed in general.

I find myself with a problem however. My system, loaded with Ubuntu and a few of the add-ons from the Ubuntu Unofficial Users Guide, seems to, over time, slow down. Distinct performance hits after about a week or so of steady use. Clicking on links in Firefox, or opening and typing in OO.o Writer, it just seems sluggish.

If this behavior could be corrected with a simple reboot, I'd suspect a memory leak somewhere, but that's not the case. I can reboot and it's immediately slow again, so that should be off the table.

I'm sorry I can't give many specifics, as I'm currently running Slack on the laptop in question (I need it to be functional for work, for the time being), but I can give general specs:

A full install of Ubuntu (not just the server install), Hoary, followed by adding Universe to the repositories and doing a full update with Synaptic. Finally, I add things like DVD playback, multimedia codecs, MS Core TTF fonts, and finally MySQL, PHP and Apache, for development purposes.

The machine in question is a Compaq laptop, running at 1GHz, with 320 Megs of RAM. I'm unaware of how fast the hard drive is, but it's an 18 gig unit, and I use about 512 Megs for swap space, though I rarely use it, even running Apache and MySQL in the background.

Has anyone else run into similar problems, with the system slowing down over time, or generally feeling sluggish after you've used it a bit?

i've only ever seen that on microsuck windoze

I read that Firefox leaks memory, I am not sure if the article was refering to the Windows or Linux version or both. The stated solution was to change the cache size to a power of two since Firefox allegedly misallocates memory using malloc function in C which can only allocate in powers of two.