Why is my system slowing down?

[Josef Lowder]

Yesterday, I noticed my system beginning to slow down quite significantly 
and I can't figure out why.  I've tried rebooting and seemed to get some 
improvement, but it is now still much slower than it has been working. 

Also, I had a strange incident in which the system seemed to dump a 
bunch (several dozen) files with apparently system-generated file names. 
Below is a small sample. When I examined some of these files, they 
seem to have come from some of my kmail archived files. 

-rw-rw-r--  1 joe  36864 Jun 25 06:10 binoK9SkIKa1N.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe 132926 Jun 25 06:44 bin9eiWHf5zec.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe 158476 Jun 25 08:14 binKTATslAhMv.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe  35954 Jun 25 08:14 binEsgNXhH2Kz.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe    508 Jun 25 08:23 bind83QVZHMwc.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe    437 Jun 25 08:26 binuNOVPDS7ye.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe 598007 Jun 25 08:34 binB2TNCImwda.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe  56732 Jun 25 08:50 binIANwfsaE3L.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe  63319 Jun 25 10:05 binYFzRX2du0W.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe  48571 Jun 25 10:05 binAj942ndTmV.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe   27149 Jun 26 05:04 jpgj6jJHsy9uW.jpg
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe     296 Jun 26 05:28 gifzB6hpclzXW.gif
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe     557 Jun 26 05:28 gifpKAMvhkScY.gif
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe   51395 Jun 26 06:12 jpg4Ra14BJLHQ.jpg
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe   39129 Jun 26 06:12 jpg2cCRvBtXCe.jpg
-rw-rw-r--  1 joe   39129 Jun 26 06:27 jpgTbiiegT73r.jpg

In addition to those listed, there were many .pdf files and 
.doc files and some .gz and some .zip suffixed files plus 
some others, the suffix of which I did not recognize. 

As nearly as I can tell, all of these dumped files are copies 
of files that are still on my system.  I am suspicious that 
this may have something to do with kmail.  Kmail seems to 
be working fine, but it sometimes takes a long time to load 
and other times loads very quickly.  After rebooting, it can 
take 15 to 25 seconds to load when first started, and then 
if I close it and start it again, it takes only 4 or 5 seconds to 
load. 

Other apps also take much longer to load the first time 
and then load much quicker if I close and reopen them. 

Here are some examples of first load times followed by second load times: 
kmail - 14 to 18 seconds then 4 seconds
firefox - 17 seconds 3 seconds
konqueror - 6 seconds then 3 seconds
kwrite - 5 seconds then 2 seconds
oo writer - 21 seconds then 5 seconds
terminal shell 3 seconds then 1 second
kview - 3 seconds then 2 seconds
ksnap - 5 seconds then 2 seconds
home - 8 seconds the 1 second

Most of these are fairly consistent in their first and second load times, 
but kmail is not.  Here are the first and second load time variances 
after loading other programs in between:

kmail 7 seconds then 4 seconds
kmail 13 seconds then not at all then 10 seconds
firefox 17 seconds then 3 seconds
kmail 20 seconds then 5 seconds
firefox 13 seconds then 3 seconds
terminal 11 seconds then 2 seconds
kmail 26 seconds then 8 seconds
kmail 50 seconds then 3 seconds

Isn't there some utility that allows one to graphically monitor 
processing times interactively? 

What should normal load times be? 

Any suggestions how to restore the system speed I used to have?