Very Slow Computer. Is my HD dying?

[hovh03]

My computer recently behaves very strangely.
Sometimes, it's fast as usual. Sometimes, it's slow to a crawl. If I start it up, and it's fast, it's like that through out. But if I start it up, and it's slow, it is slow like that for a whole time, and doesn't recover. When that happens, I saw the CPU almost 100% all the time. The hard drive light indicator would be on all time time.
The top command doesn't indicate any process that use a lot of CPU. It just has a high "wa" percent.
My remedy so far is to restart the machine, and hopes it's fast again. Sometimes it does sometimes, it doesn't.
It always start up to the login screen very fast. However, even before logging in, I can see it's slow if the hard drive light is on all the time, and not blinking). Even typing in the password would show a slow echo of the *.

This is OpenSuse 11.2, 64 bit.
The file system is ext4 (I wonder if it has something to do with this).
Does anyone have any pointers on how to troubleshoot this? I may do a re-install. However, if the hard drive is failing, then I'll just back up and wait for the day it stops working.

[devils casper]

There could be a lot of reasons. Wrong graphics driver, less disk space etc.
Execute this in Terminal :

lspci | grep -i vga
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
df -h

Post output here.

[hovh03]

There could be a lot of reasons. Wrong graphics driver, less disk space etc.
Execute this in Terminal :

lspci | grep -i vga
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
df -h

Post output here.

Please see below for the information.
For the hard drive spaces, I deleted many files of mine, and there are 12.9 Gig left on the root drive (boot up partition). There are 21 Gig left on the user home drive.
For the graphics, I was using the built-in nvidia before. Then I switched to the proprietary NVida driver. Those didn't help.
Also, why would it sometimes run fast, and sometimes run slow? Not consistent.

lspci | grep -i vga
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8700M GT] (rev a1)

grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Driver "mouse"
Driver "kbd"
Driver "nvidia"



df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 20G 5.4G 13G 30% /
udev 4.0G 276K 4.0G 1% /dev
/dev/sda7 87G 62G 21G 75% /home
/dev/sda2 71G 59G 12G 84% /mnt/sda2

[devils casper]

Graphics Driver is correct and there is a lot of free space too. Check you Hard disk through tools provided by your Hard disk Manufacturer.

[D-cat]

Check for that d@mn3d desktop Beagle crap. If you have a low RAM system and that thing starts rebuilding its index, you can crawl for hours.

Yast -> Software -> Software Management
Search: "beagle"

Remove anything installed that has to do with it.

[Feeyo]

Yes beagle is a pain in the ***.
If you could post us some output of:

tail -f /var/log/messages

If you have a failing disk it will be shown in there.
The thing with openSuSE and SuSE is that sometimes ZMD (Update Service) is going berserk and slows down your system a lot.

So when your system is slow again check in your terminal with command: top
to see what is taking all your cpu power.

[linuxaomi]

show us the result of when your PC slows down:

cat /proc/uptime (important to justify output of following commands)
iostat -x (are we cpu- or io-bound ?)
procinfo (cpu, storage, network, disk ?)
pidstat (who eats up cpu ?)
pidstat -r (who occupies storage ?)

In case one of these commands won't work ... consider installing.
In case we would be really IO-bound than I can provide a solution. Please ask.

Good luck,
linuxaomi