My PC tends to work sluggish from time to time. Usually during specific actions, like opening certain applications or moving files around. I want to figure out what causes it. Is there a good way to check writing/reading speed of all my components (disk, RAM, CPU)?
I have used Phoronix in the past and it’s pretty great, but I don’t have any good figures to compare my results with.
How to check if the problem is within software. Maybe I simply use too many heavy applications and my machine can’t handle it?
It’s about 5 years old. It was pretty powerful when I got it, so I don’t think it should be slowing down too much. I might use some extra RAM though (I have 8GB).
I would try to use something like htop and try to see what consumes too much CPU when the slowdown happens.
It would also be interesting to know which distro and desktop environment.
I would try to use something like htop and try to see what consumes too much CPU when the slowdown happens.
I use system activities to check RAM and CPU usage, but in most cases it doesn’t show anything interesting. Perhaps there’s a tool that could run in the background and give me some sort or report at the end instead of me trying to check it in real time?
It would also be interesting to know which distro and desktop environment.
8gb of ram is usually enough, even for most DE’s in Linux. I run KDE Plasma with 8gb on a Zenbook with 2-core i5 with no issues. I mostly do email, surf the web, and some Python scripting on it and it has no issues with memory. I have not tried to edit a large HD video with kdenlive on it, though.
Which OS are you running? What CPU does it have? Is it a laptop or desktop? There are many things that can contribute to slowness.
Run fsck on the disk(s). If there are bad sectors, fsck will mark them and will try to relocated the data. If bad sectors are the issue, this should correct the problem.
At 5 years your thermal paste will be like chalk so dedusting wont help much if the heat doesn’t making it to the heatsink. It could be contributing to the lag or the whole source.
Looks like you got a lot of other replies. I have not used fsck as @Mr_McBride suggested, but if you’re familiar with htop there is also iotop (and maybe run it as iotop --only to make it easier to look at). Doesn’t record it per se, but it will show load while you’re opening things. You can also install sysstat and use iostat.
I would slap in a SSD drive if you do not have one. Makes a massive difference. I have laptop four years of age with 16GB of RAM with Debian on it. It started to get so very slow, and even hang at times. Turns out it was the drive for sure. Dell put in a low end Toshiba hard drive which is slower than a SATA 2 drive I have made way back in 2011.