Linux Mint is very slow, how to fix it?

Question

linux

Hello! I recently switched to Linux, chose Linux Mint 13 Mate x64. At first everything was OK, I was happy.
Yesterday I decided to transfer files from one screw to another (30 gigs), the computer could not be used at all, everything slowed down to impossibility, and on the system monitor the processor load was about 30% (jumped from 20 to 50). Well, that's okay.
Right now he is downloading a torrent, he decided to listen to music. I listened, damn it, about every half minute the sound shuts up for half a second. I don't know about you, but things like this really piss me off. I set the player (Exaile) to have a priority on the nice scale -10, it didn't help :( Well, it got a little better, of course, it doesn't matter...
Why is this happening? Nothing is running, Firefox, PyCharm, Deluge, Terminal and nginx with uwsgi. On WinXP, I regularly sat with such a set + played WorldOfTanks and the player did not slow down (in general, the computer did not slow down)
Intel E6600 Dual Core / 3.06 GHz / 1033
DDR3 4 GB mushkin
Please help me fix it.

Answer 1

As a beginner to a beginner, install htop and see which processes are eating what. And try to kill them, as soon as the system starts to move - the source of the blockage has been found :)

Answer 2

PyCharm eats the CPU like crazy (as, by the way, everything that is written in java) Especially during the initial indexing of all files of an already existing project. Although the version about ntfs is also interesting. Try to reproduce the brakes by excluding the disk with ntfs for the experiment. If it becomes good, then this is it, and we need to dig already in this direction.

Answer 3

How about your HDD? The jamb in the compatibility of ubuntu with the disk controller on the mother is also not excluded.

Answer 4

You most likely have bug 12309. Run top, not htop, or turn on "Detailed CPU time" in htop, and look at the WA value.
Most likely, you will not be able to get rid of this. You can try to install pf-kernel (-ck patches and bfq disk scheduler). Well, get rid of ntfs.

Answer 5

> how to fix?
Switch to Windows XP? Several disks are mounted in NTFS, nothing slows down.

Answer 6

On Windows, sometimes noticeable, but not critical brakes are observed when copying large data. It's not the CPU load that's to blame, but the I / O subsystem load, because. copying loads the screw by more than 90 percent.

Answer 7

if on the first day everything worked quickly (and you did not restart the computer), then most likely the problem is in the swap file. The more it fills up, the more the system slows down.