On 09/02/15 13:21, Bev Nicolson wrote:
I asked about my slow to boot (and sometimes slow to shut down) pc a while back now and have htop installed. I should have asked this then but which bit of the info it gives me do I need to give you lot in order to diagnose the problem?
OK, You need to start HTOP whilst it's being slow. You can either start a command prompt from the menu system, but I think the best way would be to CTRL-ALT-F2 to bring up a full screen text console. You'll need to log in using your usual user name and password.
Once logged in, type htop
This will start Htop. There's a bar graph across the top called CPU. If the computer's being slow, I'd expect this to be running around 90-100%
Then, once only, press F6 to bring up the sort by menu. Cursor up or down until Percent CPU is highlighted and press enter. This will ensure the displayed tasks are sorted by how much CPU they are using. Whatever task or tasks are at the top are probably what's hogging the CPU. If there's something at between 70 and 100 %, then that's probably the culprit. Alternatively, if there's something at less than 50% but it's at the top of the list of tasks, then that process might be i/o bound - i.e. trying to get stuff from the disk or memory, and waiting for that.
Report back what you get. Press F10 or Q for Quit to exit htop To get back to the normal gui screen, press CTRL-ALT-F7. If that doesn't work, try CTRL-ALT-F6 or CTRL-ALT-F8.
Other thoughts - lack of disk space, or insufficient memory, causing the swap file to be in constant use. Check the first by typing df -h in a prompt If anything has free space less than 1GB, or use % greater than 90, then that may be the problem.
You may be able to see how much swap is in use by using swapon -s in a prompt. Alternatively there's a real-time graph in ubuntu which you can get somehow, but I don't recall how. Is it called system monitor in the menu?
Good luck! Steve