Hi I've been running Ubuntu for a year now and everything was pretty smooth.

Recently however, the system has become much slower than before. For example, I click on firefox, and it takes several minutes for it to start running. Maximizing and minimizing windows also causes some major lags. It seems that anything that involves graphics is lagging horribly.

If I do glxgears -printfps I get like 800.000 FPS (the wheels are hardly moving at all...) even though I did the same thing a year ago and the wheels were turning super fast and I remember having like 2000.000 FPS or something.

I'm not sure but I think this all started to happen after I upgraded to Dapper. I think it has something to do with my nvidia driver since I remember having to re-install it when upgrading to Dapper. I don't think its a memory leak since it doesn't make any difference whether I restart the computer or not. The hardware is fine and doesn't seem to be overheating.

I have a 1GHz Intel Pentium III processor, 512 MB memory and a NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX/MX 400 graphic card. Can anyone help me?

I'm not sure if it was with auto-updater, but when I upgraded to dapper (using apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade) I think it upgraded the kernel too.

What is the output of this command ?
Replace "hda" with the hard drive ubuntu is installed on.

This is what I get:

~$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Model=HDS722580VLAT20, FwRev=V32OA6MA, SerialNo=VN621ECBEJJS6D
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=52
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1794kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=160836480
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a: ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6

* signifies the current active mode

Did you upgrade the kernel recently with auto updater ?

I have always been using Gnome as my display manager. I'm pretty sure I didn't change it.

GNOME is the standard window manager for Ubuntu, have you always used thsi one, or did you ever use another one? If you changed from a lightweight window manager to a heavier one, such as GNOME or KDE, then that might explain your problems.

I don't think I changed my display manager because, well, I don't really know what it is... (so maybe I changed it inadvertently?)

Oh and I don't know if it helps but,

Here's what I get when I type 'free' in the terminal:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515920 406840 109080 0 14836 205316
-/+ buffers/cache: 186688 329232
Swap: 1510068 0 1510068


Here's what I get when I type 'top' in the terminal:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4303 root 15 0 47704 32m 8932 S 15.0 6.4 2:49.22 Xorg
6473 bchen 15 0 40788 15m 9700 S 6.6 3.0 0:04.37 gnome-terminal
4946 bchen 15 0 165m 70m 17m S 5.0 14.1 4:10.90 firefox-bin
4852 bchen 15 0 40372 21m 11m S 1.7 4.3 0:22.31 gnome-panel
4846 bchen 15 0 14892 8776 5984 S 1.0 1.7 0:11.44 metacity
4918 bchen 15 0 29056 9068 6672 S 0.3 1.8 0:00.75 gnome-netstatus
4933 bchen 16 0 14612 2776 1860 S 0.3 0.5 0:02.77 gnome-screensav
6508 bchen 16 0 2192 1108 856 R 0.3 0.2 0:00.65 top
1 root 16 0 1568 528 460 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.07 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.11 events/0
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
6 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
8 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 kblockd/0
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
101 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
102 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
104 root 17 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
103 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd0
691 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
1814 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
1890 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.12 kjournald
2123 ro 1f40 ot 12 -4 2428 920 368 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.71 udevd
2914 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 shpchpd_event
3051 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kgameportd
3765 root 16 0 2156 1200 644 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.01 acpid
3858 syslog 16 0 1768 672 548 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.03 syslogd
3884 root 16 0 1676 492 412 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.05 dd
3886 klog 17 0 2424 1352 388 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.12 klogd
3905 messageb 16 0 2188 860 668 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.10 dbus-daemon
3920 haldaemo 16 0 6760 5356 1556 S 0.0 1.0 0:01.98 hald
3921 root 19 0 2720 980 836 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.06 hald-runner
3926 haldaemo 17 0 2004 792 696 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 hald-addon-acpi
3976 haldaemo 16 0 2000 788 692 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.12 hald-addon-keyb
3987 haldaemo 16 0 2008 816 716 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.26 hald-addon-stor
3988 haldaemo 16 0 2004 816 716 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.31 hald-addon-stor
3990 haldaemo 16 0 2008 816 716 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.07 hald-addon-stor
3991 haldaemo 16 0 2008 816 716 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.08 hald-addon-stor
4012 avahi 16 0 2536 1308 1128 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.01 avahi-daemon
4013 avahi 22 0 2536 432 284 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 avahi-daemon
4269 root 15 0 10908 1792 1212 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 gdm
4292 root 16 0 11260 2556 1912 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.02 gdm
4312 hplip 16 0 12872 920 696 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 hpiod
4319 hplip 15 0 9416 4668 1092 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.02 python
4366 cupsys 16 0 4208 1800 1312 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.05 cupsd

Have you recently changed your display manager?