2010/1/15 Chris G cl@isbd.net:
I've tried to analyse what's going on by running top (and 'w' and ps) in a console window while the system starts up but I really can't see anything obvious that's hogging any resource. One noticeable thing apart from the load average being so high is that my 8Gb of memory gets eaten up too, but there seem to be no particular processes using either lots of CPU or lots of memory.
Can anyone suggest further ways of trying to diagnose this?
While top is running press Shift-M to sort by memory usage. On my desktop PC firefox is using 7.3%, followed by Xorg and nautilius at 0.5% each.
Pressing Shift-T to sort by accumulated time, I see firefox at 41 hours, followed by trackerd at 7 hours, Xorg at 2 hours and compiz.real with just 23 minutes. Anything interesting show up on your system?
Tim.