[Solved] Intermittent slowdown / freeze in Maui 2

[markce]

I have no idea if this is software or hardware but any pointers as to how to pin this down would be appreciated.

Several weeks ago my desktop (AMD FX-8320 running Maui 2.1) developed intermittent freezes / slowdowns. The slowdowns last between 30 sec to over 5min at times. They seem to be associated with switching activities, Firefox, Dolphin or file selection say when saving a file but can happen at other times.  And of course I can do all the above for half an hour or more without incident at times. I used to have Firefox open all the time but now I open it only when needed. I seem to have fewer slowdowns but they still occur.

The only coincident changes which may or may not have any relevance are:

• I activated Baloo to try to find a deeply lost reference file but the indexer seemed to get stuck in a folder so I deactivated file indexing via System settings;
  
• I noticed during one of the pauses that Firefox was trying to access securepubads.g.doubleclick.net which seemed suspicious; there did not appear to be a suspicious cookie present as advised by some online sources but I deleted all cookies anyway; the pauses continued.
  

I had installed the CPU Load Monitor widget on several activity desktops to see if I could catch anything. The CPU load on 1 or 2 cores jump to 100% during slowdowns (and it can jump between cores).  I have occasionally been able to get to the command line and start top during a slowdown. No unusual loading shows in top while the widget shows ongoing 100% CPU loading.

To see if this is software or hardware, I tried to install Maui 1703 on a test partition but the installation fails to get passed "Gathering system information" so no help there. (I have another post on this issue).

I am a linux user but not an administrator so my knowledge of troubleshooting from here has been exhausted. Any thoughts on what I might do next would be appreciated. Does this hint at a hardware problem?

Thanks

[leszek]

Like said in the other thread might be filesystem related. Check your filesystem with fsck /dev/<yourpartition>

Otherwise it would be cool if you could get the processname that uses one core at 100%. Everything is else would be poking in the dark.

[markce]

Thank you leszek - a hardware problem.

A partition of one of the hard drives had errors. After corrections and smartmon passed the disk, I had hardly used it when some other strange things happened. I decided it was safer to replace it as it was my main data drive. And I decided I may as well do a clean install of Maui 1703.

Thank you for pointing the direction.