System suddenly slowed down...

[Thomas Cameron]

On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 23:53 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> After performing a yum clean packages and then a yum clean all, my FC3
> system started slowing down. I would press a key and wait a few
> seconds for a response. Then it was a minute wait. Then it was
> infinete.
> 
> I had to shut it down with 'the switch' to get back to where I am now.
> But the truth is, although this happened after cleaning yum, this is
> not the first time that it has happened to me. I had Opera, konsole,
> kmail, and konqerer open at the time.
> 
> I can hear the hard disk crunching away whenever that happens. The
> computer is an AMD Duron machine with 512 megs of SDram. Note that I
> can move the mouse and the pointer keeps up with me. Other than that-
> frozen.
> 
> Any ideas what to look for? I will try to keep track of what is
> running when this happens, when it happens again.

When you see the system do this, run the command top.  It will show you
the process that is eating your resources.

Thomas