Why is my system slowing down?

[Josef Lowder]

On Tuesday 27 June 2006 09:17, Josef Lowder wrote: 
> 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. 

On Tuesday 27 June 2006 10:44 am, Dennis Kibbe wrote: 
> You might start by posting the output of "df -h" 
> This will tell us if a partition is starting to approach 100% capacity. 

Here is the result:
$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             9.7G  7.4G  1.9G  81% /
/dev/hdb1             4.0G  1.3G  2.7G  32% /mnt/windows

Also, FoulDragon at aol.com wrote: 
> I might look at top (sort with capital-M) and see if something's 
> eating a lot  of memory.  If you're near the point where swap-out 
> occurs, it may not be cacheing the  apps, so they don't load as 
> fast as they otherwise would the second time. 

I don't know what "sort with capital-M" means as there is no 
capital-M shown in the top manual (man top).  But here is the 
result of top: 

top - 09:14:35 up 3 days,  1:05,  4 users,  load average: 2.57, 2.40, 2.75
Tasks:  94 total,   1 running,  93 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.3% us,  1.3% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 97.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    515484k total,   509340k used,     6144k free,     1632k buffers
Swap:  1269084k total,   100652k used,  1168432k free,   324128k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3923 joe       15   0  152m  86m 5536 S  1.7 17.2   2693:39 kded
   81 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.3  0.0   1:05.87 kblockd/0
 3656 joe       16   0 31308 9944 3216 S  0.3  1.9   2:08.92 mdkapplet
22243 joe       16   0  1996 1036  804 R  0.3  0.2   0:00.01 top
    1 root      16   0  1560  452  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.92 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.07 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:02.17 events/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
    5 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
    7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
  116 root      19  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  115 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   4:54.99 kswapd0

  793 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  0.0  0.0   0:15.98 kjournald
  937 root      11  -4  1564  456  404 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.13 udevd
 1169 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd
 2348 root      16   0  1580  428  408 S  0.0  0.1   0:04.80 ifplugd
 2410 root      16   0  1608  548  484 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.10 syslogd
 2418 root      15   0  2324  440  436 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.06 klogd
 2450 root      16   0  1548  444  440 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 acpid
 2536 root      16   0  5756 1020  664 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.58 cupsd
 2677 root      23   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kgameportd
 2835 xfs       16   0  4196 1152  716 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.73 xfs
 2850 messageb  16   0  2220  792  696 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.12 dbus-daemon-1
 2865 root      16   0  4128 1352 1036 S  0.0  0.3   1:34.79 hald
 3018 root      16   0  2796  616  536 S  0.0  0.1   0:13.40 nifd
 3029 root      17   0  2612  436  432 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 kdm
 3031 root      15   0 31116  15m 2260 S  0.0  3.1  88:40.58 X
 3073 root      16   0  3420  632  628 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.02 kdm
 3115 nobody    16   0 11420  732  616 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.01 mDNSResponder
 3134 daemon    16   0  1684  508  472 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 atd