Linux being horrendously slow.

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Ok, as I'm sure everyone here already knows, I'm still a bit of a linux n00b. I use it mainly as an internet condom, if you will, knowing I'm protected from pretty much everything out there.

Lately, however, I've been having trouble with it. The computer shuts itself off randomly, without me even touching it. It's trying to go to sleep, I think, but it's buggy. My programmes are all beginning to lag horribly, to the point where I often have time to get a cup of coffee before it's done loading.

Now, if this was Windows, I'd have a dig through the registry, see if any new friends had shown up. Maybe turn off a startup item or two. But in Linux, I have NO idea how to do any of this.

I run Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty with no major modifications. At any given time I'm running GIMP, OO, Rythembox, and Pidgin, usually with a firefox window open on top. I set it to have a 4 gig, I think, swap, along with 2 gigs of ram.

So... can anyone give me any ideas on what to check to see why it's running so poorly? I've never had trouble with this before, Linux usually runs beautifully. Any advice would be welcome.

Can you see with (command line command) "top" what is running in the background? Sometimes apps go into a strangeloop and start using 99.999....% of cpu.

and nothing looks out of the ordnary in dmesg or the /var/logs/* ?

Also take a look at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=616744 and http://www.google.com/search?client=saf ... 8&oe=UTF-8

it shuts down softly or goes down hard? you may have a hardware problem?

Try looking up other computers such as via host wrongplanet.net and see how long it takes to get a response. I noticed that sometimes when network connections are slow, my computer will be slow in opening programs.

There is also a place for Startup items somewhere in the Administration or Preferences menu, but that shouldn't be a real issue. The apps you listed are pretty heavy, but nothing that your machine shouldn't be able to handle.

Like Fuzzy said, it may be a problem with the swap. With 2GB of RAM, you really probably don't even need swap space at all. I never use it. Or, you could change the "swappiness" setting, it's an integer 1-100. IIRC, higher means it will move stuff to swap faster, lower means it will try to keep it all in main memory. Try a few different settings, see what works.

As far as shutting off for no reason, check the power saving settings. Ubuntu has messed those up for me on a few occasions, and suspend/hibernate may or may not be broken on your hardware.

Well, I turned off swap. Noticeable difference on the net, but that may have something to do with it being 0940 here, not many people bogging down the cool sites. I suppose I'll know for sure in a day or so.

I know there is a hardware issue with this computer, one of the pins on the CPU is broken off. It seems to cause momentary mouse freezes in both OS's, and thats the only thing. I was using it like this for months before this problem without an issue other than that. I don't have these issues in Windoze, so I suppose it's safe to rule out the hardware. It's a sad day when I can honestly say windoze runs better than linux.

And Orwell, I don't even try with the sleep settings. I've never been able to get them to do anything, much less work, so I just disable sleep.

And the random shutdowns I'm talking about, to elaborate: the screen goes black for a second, screensaver pops up, then screen goes black again. Then the computer shuts off. I disabled hibernate, so I know it's not doing that. Its acting almost like the power button was hit, but without the little 'your computer will shut down in 60 seconds' dialog.

I recall Linus being somewhat arrogant, so maybe that is what is happening to your OS, as well?

Kip, have you tried checking how much space you have left. I'm not sure about why the computer would shut down on its own but I've had a problem with everything being slow, earlier on in the year and I'm currently using Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Firefox also seemed to of lost its short term memory, not remembering the pages I had recently been to. It happened after an upgrade and it turned out that 100% of the space was used up. Because Linux is made up of many different programs that communicate with each other, it needs some space for them to communicate properly. Once I freed up some space, by deleting quite a few package files and some programs and components that I didn't need, it worked fine. Then again, you could also have a hardware problem so maybe it would be best if you checked that as well.

Boot from the Ubuntu CD and run memtest?