[tlug] Slooooooow down

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

TLUG,

These days it feels like I'm always wrestling with something.

My Mythbuntu (I use it mostly for storing and playing music and videos)
machine is suddenly slow. By "suddenly", I mean within the last few
days. At first, I just thought there was some out of control process or
something, so I rebooted a few times, but it's not going away.

I can click a button or type something at the terminal and it can take
up to 15 seconds to respond, which is crazy slow.

Of course, I run htop to see what's going on, but no single process
shows over 5% usage, and all total process are never above 10% to 15%.

I had a problem similar to this before, on another machine, which turned
out to be Apache running some out of control process. This time, it's a
little different in that I'm feeling it in slow response times, not
seeing my CPU monitor reporting activity.

My toolbox for diagnosing this doesn't go beyond trying to find a
process in htop and killing it. Is there anything else I can do?

Oh, I primarily access this computer remotely, via a terminal, so
whatever I do I need to do from the command line (not that most guys on
this list are big GUI advocates anyway...)

Any tips would be much appreciated.

-- 
Dave M G