Resolving system performance issues

My system has become slow of late, most notably when running Rhythmbox, where I have a substantial music library.

I would appreciate guidance on the best way forward. I have
taken to having only Rhythmbox open, closing it for when I want to use the document scanner.

Running df /var shows 15% used and the disk analyser reports 589.5GB available.

I have installed Bleachbit but have not as yet run it.

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

It is unlikely that your performance problem is related to disc storage.

It is more likely to be related to memory or cpu usage. So, we have to find out which exact processes create that massive use and then, why.

First, checkout the following in a terminal while you have the performance issues:
ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,%cpu --sort=%cpu
ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,%cpu --sort=%mem
df

Given your explanation, I would start to execute these three commands while the following conditions take place.

  1. run the commands while: rhytmbox is open, do your document scanning in parallel.
  2. run the commands while: document scanning.
  3. run the commands while: rhytmbox is open.

The reason why I put df on the list is to ensure that non of your applications make any directory/partition running out of space while the app is active (e.g., through temporary files, which may be deleted later, hidding the issue when df is executed after deletion). Nevertheless, if there is a no-space-left issue, this would have different symptoms. But just to be sure … df doesn’t hurt :slight_smile:

I was able to scan while I had a terminal window open, but Rhythmbox did not show when I ran a ps command; it appeared to have closed as soon as I had opened Document Scanner.

Just to be on the same page: when you open your document scanner, Rhytmbox crashes? I think that’s the point where we have to involve the logs.

Try the above actions again, and after that, show us the output of journalctl -n 50

Also, while your machine underperforms, the output of the above ps commands remains relevant, at least the last few lines: what processes make up the majority of cpu + memory usage while your machine underperforms?