Xfce is very slow, part 2

[Allin Cottrell]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014, Hartmut Haase wrote:

> 4. C) Really bad HDD performance: my HDD is the newest part of the PC
> $>sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
> [sudo] password for haase:
> smartctl 6.2 2013-04-20 r3812 [i686-linux-3.11.0-15-generic] (local build)
> Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
[snip]

You got some uninformed noise in response to your HDD information. See
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Howto_ReadSmartctlReports_ATA
for how to read such reports. In fact there's no indication of trouble in 
your report (though a firmware update may be a good thing).

Here are the lines that someone said were problematic:

  ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH
    1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   118   099   006
    7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   077   060   030

The thing is the _small_ values are bad here (a value less than THRESH is 
considered a failure). Your values are perfectly healthy.

> $>free
>             Gesamt Belegt Frei Gemeinsam Puffer Cached
> Speicher:    1018104     905188     112916          0     191836     360764
> -/+ Puffer/Cache:     352588     665516
> Auslagerungsdatei:    1052220     175804     876416

This seems more relevant: you have about 90% of RAM in use and are well 
into swap. With your system in that position I can see that it might take 
a while to start up another big application. Maybe you're running 
something that's gradually leaking memory.

Allin Cottrell