Bouts of Extreme System Slug

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Hello, All,

  I am running F10 on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop, about two years
old, with 2GB memory and Centrino Due processors. Since a few weeks,
my laptop is suffering from bouts of sluggishness, typically lasting
for maybe a minute to a few minutes, and I have a feeling, it is
progressively getting worse. During these phases, everything is
running slow and GUI response is delayed for seconds or longer.
According to the system monitor, both processors are busy (up to
almost hundred percent); memory usage is well below one half and no
swap space is used, and network traffic is low, too.

  The more applications I am running, the more noticeable these phases
of sluggishness become, although I am not sure whether this cuases
them or whether it just makes them more noticeable. In any case, when
I open more or more intensive applications, the onset of sluggishness
usually takes minutes, and persists minutes after applications are
closed again.

  How can I diagnose what causes the sluggishness?

  I considered running fsck or badblocks, but these can only be used
on unmounted file systems, and I find that even if I boot single user
mode, the root file system is mounted and can not be unmounted (says
it's busy).

  I also experience some other problems, such as occasional crashes of
Firefox and OpenJDK. I am connected to the Internet via DHCP. When I
go to some places (including Stata Center, MIT) and connect to the
network (wired or wireless) there, my laptop freezes entirely in
irregular intervals (can be minutes or hours) and does not recover.

  Thanks for the help!

     Take care
     Oliver

-- 
Oliver Ruebenacker, Computational Cell Biologist
BioPAX Integration at Virtual Cell (http://vcell.org/biopax)
Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling
http://www.oliver.curiousworld.org