[PLUG] Sluggish machine

[Dick Steffens]

On 09/22/2017 01:34 PM, John Meissen wrote:
> dick at dicksteffens.com said:
>> My machine opens programs slowly. It used to be that I'd double click on  a
>> spreadsheet icon and LibreOffice would open it in at most a couple of
>> seconds. Now it takes several. What steps should I take to figure out  what's
>> causing this slow down?
> This is usually one of two things:
>    memory usage
>    hard drive errors
>
> Run 'dmesg' and check the output for drive related messages.

Lots of Greek-to-me stuff. One warning that appears quite a lot is:

[3411389.621045] systemd-hostnamed[19228]: Warning: nss-myhostname is 
not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. 
Please install nss-myhostname!

I Googled nss-myhostname. The first hit was:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/453072/what-is-nss-myhostname-and-why-is-it-not-installable

which seems to say, "Don't worry about it."

In the middle of a bunch of those, this popped up:

[3839876.872551] mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
[3868978.858304] mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged



> Use 'free' and 'top' (sort by memory) to see what memory usage looks like.

rsteff at Enu-1:~$ free
              total       used       free     shared buffers     cached
Mem:       8113844    5138188    2975656      19664 49444     789852
-/+ buffers/cache:    4298892    3814952
Swap:      8255484     947520    7307964
rsteff at Enu-1:~$

(As reported in my response to Rich, I'm not clear on what to look at 
with top.)

> I don't know about other browsers, but Firefox will grow to consume enormous
> amounts of memory. If you leave it running for days it can use up all of your
> RAM. I typically kill it and restart it daily. :-/

That made a difference. I closed the LibreOffice files I had open, shut 
down Firefox, and then reopened the LibreOffice files. They opened much 
more quickly ... quick enough that I would not have thought about them.

The programs I tend to leave running 24/7 are Thunderbird, Firefox, 
VirtualBox with Win 7, and Skype. I open and close LibreOffice files 
throughout the day, a mix of spreadsheet and writer files. And sometimes 
I have a gedit file open.

I'll try your recommendation of regularly restarting Firefox and see if 
that solves this particular sluggishness issue.

Thanks.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens