System extremely slow!

[alexraasch]

Well, I'm starting to get really p***ed by this one. I have 2.6.1-gentoo-r1 running on a Toshiba 3000-514 with X, KDE 3.2, OOo and a whole bunch of other normal stuff. The system has been running perfectly for about two months or so. But then a couple of weeks ago, weird things started to happen. When I boot the machine I can work for about 2 hours without any problems, but then the system is getting extremely slow for about 10-40 minutes. To give you a picture: I couldn't even read this post while I was typing it as the letters weren't drawn fast enough! Normal operating speed returns for another 30-60 minutes, then everything slows down again ...

I have already tried stopping several services, even X, been rebooting repeatedly. Nothing helped. Sometimes the slowdown occurs during the boot process too. I took a look at the process table and it appeared that events/0 was taking about 80% of system%.

Please help!

[NeddySeagoon]

alexraasch,

Have a look in /etc/cron*. You maybe have a cron job being kicked off.
Run them by hand in turn to see if you can reporduce the symptoms.

Cron jobs that don't run on time because the machine was off are rescheduled in some way, they are not lost. that makes sure your logs are always rotated sometime at least and the whereis database gets updated.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[alexraasch]

Sorry, it wan't the cron jobs. The system has been running for the past week, but now ...
Any ideas?

[Sipi]

Maybe your HDD get failing, and it kicked ack in mode and in speed. Try to see the S.M.A.R.T. parameters, maybe helps.

Or it could be some kind of overheating, thus the BIOS protecton scales down the CPU.

Sipi