[Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running

[Rich Braun]

David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>
> The first couple of line from "top -c" read

Dude, Firefox ate your machine.  Switch to Google Chrome and you'll never go
back.  I've excerpted some of your 'top' command below.  Comments:

* The 81.4%wa figure (and 13.3/5.0% CPU) means it's I/O bound not CPU (wa =
waiting for disk)
* Mem of 50892k free plus 62024k cached (which appears on the swap line of
output but that figure is not swap, it's the amount available for cache
buffers) is a maxed-out situation, less than 10% of total.
* The "D" state on the firefox line says at the moment you ran 'top', firefox
was waiting on disk.

I knew, used, and loved Firefox for years.  But it's too bloated even for a
4GB machine these days, let alone a 2GB.
* The "RES" column shows how much RAM each process is actually using at the
moment; in this case, firefox is using 264Mb (out of a total RAM footprint of
1174Mb, the rest of which is swapped).

Get your swap usage down close to zero.  By installing Chrome.  There might be
other culprits but that's the biggie that I've seen in situations like this. 
2Gb is not quite adequate for most situations these days, but it's OK for a
browser-only laptop.

-rich

> ...
> Cpu(s): 13.3%us,  5.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id, 81.4%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.2%si,
> Mem:   2060180k total,  2009288k used,    50892k free,     3488k buffers
> Swap:  1574328k total,  1492652k used,    81676k free,    62024k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>
>  6835 david     20   0  704m 184m 2352 R   20  9.2 142:15.54
> plugin-containe
> 19747 david     20   0  226m 170m 4868 S   15  8.5   4:07.80 geeqie
>
>  1185 root      20   0  231m  82m 6488 S    1  4.1 137:38.82 Xorg
>
>  6637 david     20   0 1174m 264m  11m D    1 13.2  99:02.16 firefox