Take the tour ×  I'm using Ubuntu and every couple minutes it
goes unresponsive for a half second to a full second, which
isn't normally a problem but makes trying to code extremely
frustrating when your trying to hit backspace or navigate the
code and nothing is happening. The problem is, the freezes are
so brief that top doesn't have time to show me what is spiking
the CPU (assuming something is, but I don't know what else could
cause this).  Does anyone know how to troubleshoot this
performance issue?  Edit: I've tried login in with Gnome Classic
(No Effects) instead of Unity but it still freezes up every once
in awhile.  Edit: The CPU graph doesn't seem to be showing any
actual spikes so it seems you were right and my original
diagnosis of CPU spikes being the problem was incorrect, I now
suspect IO wait. I don't recall this happening for the brief few
weeks I had Windows 7 Starter running on it though, which leads
me to believe it isn't (just?) the hardware.. is there anything
I can tweak to improve this