I see user interface lag in ubuntu 10.10, but there's no obvious cause that I can tell. Where else do I look?

Question

A few years ago I finally gave up using windows for my main development machine. So I installed the latest ubuntu and I've been keeping up until 10.10, which is what I have now. The machine is a core 2 quad 3ghz with 8 gigs of memory. I run a lot of stuff sure, but I use no swap, and everything runs along speedily, but every once in a while I get a 2-3 second lag before my keyboard input is processed.

I watch the system monitor, and vmstat and iostat, and there's nothing going on.

I think the machine is fine, and there's something wrong with gnome, but I have no idea what to fix or configure. Windows has a lot of problems, but it gave a lot of cpu priority to the mouse and keyboard, and was far less annoying to use in this regard. Any suggestions? I've got 47 day uptime, and if rebooting is the answer clearly linux still has a long way to go.

Answer 1

I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Update to 11.10:

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.maverick
sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list

Replace all instances of maverick with natty

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Repeat the process again but

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.natty

and replace all instances of natty with oneiric.

2.Update packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade