[PLUG] Sluggish machine

[John Meissen]

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.

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

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. :-/