Linux desktop sluggish over time

[Marc Lanctot]

Hello,

Considering my experience with Linux this seems to be a problem a should 
have fixed by now, but it's an problem I'm growing particularly annoyed 
with.

I notice that over time Linux desktops I use tend to get sluggish. I 
know this is true for at least Ubuntu and Fedorah. I don't remember 
feeling it as much on Debian, but it's been a while.

Anyway, here goes. Sometimes I leave my home Ubuntu machine on for a 
while; I'm talking like 2-3 weeks, maybe more. Sometimes I run 
CPU-intensive apps for a few hours, then leave it idle for days. It just 
seems like over time, the machine gets increasingly unresponsive. After 
rebooting and opening up Thunderbird, the new message window pops up 
right away. After several weeks it takes twice the amount of time or 
more. And, while I thought maybe the GUI/X/Video Driver (nVidia Quadro 
NVS 290) might be to blame, the sluggishness is noticeable even when I 
ssh into my machine from outside.. so it's not just GUI response time. 
But sometimes the problem is less noticeable if I restart X, so ..

We're talking about a new Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0 GHz with 4 GB of RAM.

For a while I suspected Gnome was the culprit. Could it be? This seems 
way less noticeable when I use fluxbox, but alas, I need a user-friendly 
desktop for the girlfriend.

I suspect this may be due to processes left open that consume most of 
memory but the problem persists even after killing some of those large 
processes.

I know for a fact that Ubuntu comes with a lot of little trinkets that 
are spiffy and supposed to make "Linux easier to use" or more modern but 
sometimes they can slow the machine down. Compiz, for example, is a 
culprit. Pulseaudio too. *But* even after removing these unneeded apps 
the problem still happens.

So, to my question... does anybody know what is going on here and has 
been through similar trouble? I suspect that it is memory/virtual memory 
related.. like, over time the OS doesn't handle memory management as 
well by default, but if I set a few flags this will all magically 
change. I don't want to take the easy way out and just reboot; I want to 
understand what the problem is.

Linux's performance is one of the main reasons I initially ditched 
Windows (don't worry, there have been a lot of reasons since that have 
made me stick with it), and now it seems like many distros are going the 
"unneeded bloat" route... it makes me sad. I just hope it -- meaning my 
particular problem -- can be fixed.

Thanks,
Marc

-- 
Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice
is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine
theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
   -- Anonymous
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