kubuntu 12.04 performance deterioration

[joe at actionline.com]

Thanks for the very helpful responses.

Can't believe that I had never heard of CTRL+ESC before. That was very
revealing, though I don't know which items in that list I could safely
remove/kill/delete.

Is there some way to save a copy of that list to a text file?

My system is a Thinkpad with 1.86GHz processor and 1.5-gig ram I don't
know how determine how much "swapping to disk" there is. Could not find
any file named /var/log/messages? Thanks to the CTRL+ESC tip, I could
indeed see that some processes are consuming a lot of memory (like
krunner), and that is one reason why I'd like to be able to post the list
that CTRL+ESC reveals.

One more very strange problem, I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox and
then it worked once and then apparently vanished again.  It appears in the
menu, but when I click on the menu icon, a desktop firefox icon bounces
for a few seconds (how to stop that annoying effect?) and then vanishes
and firefox does not load.


-----------
Brian wrote:
> A runaway task would be my guess as well (Ctrl + ESC is
> your friend). I've installed the lastest kubuntu on many
> machines and I've had the opposite results. KDE just keeps
> getting faster and faster with every new release including
> 4.9 which has a very noticable speed increase.
> Was this a fresh install, or an upgrade?

------------------------------
Previously, James Mcphee wrote:
> Standard system troubleshooting would be a good place to start.  What is
> your IO and CPU like?  Are you swapping to disk a lot?  Do you have any
> obvious errors in /var/log/messages?  Do some of your processes consume
> an inordinate amount of memory?  etc etc
> Standard system troubleshooting would be a good place to start.
> What is your IO and CPU like?