Knoppix slows down drastically after a short while

Hi all, hope someone can help here! I am trying out the latest Version of Knoppix booting from a 8GB USB Flash Drive. It's an HP NC6400 notebook with an ATI X1300 discrete graphics card. Things work great for a while, compiz is smooth and Iceweasel is smooth. After about 15 minutes though things get so slow, compiz is jerky, and iceweasel takes forever. Videos stop playing after say 20 seconds. I disabled compiz at boot by "knoppix no3d: - ok for a while again but things slows down drastically after 15 minutes. I notice also that the CPU load gets high though nothing is running, just idling.

Hi, just been investigating more. All is fine until I try to play a video. The video may play for a short while then stop. Sometimes I just get sound even though I may have had vision with the same file earlier. Always after this however, I get the big slowdown

Hi nickp,

No one to help ? Here is something to do that should help find where the problem is.

Please confirm you are using Knoppix 6.4.4. with the LXDE desktop.

Reboot and when the desktop comes open an LXTerminal (if in doubt, click on the third button in on the bar at the bottom of the screen).

In the terminal, type in top. This shows a list of the processes running on your machine. It refreshes every second or so. Processes near the top are using most CPU. When the system is idle, Xorg, compiz, init and and top are likely to be up there.

Type ^C to stop top. Copy and paste the lines from the top of the terminal down to kthreadd into a file so you can post them later. Start top again. Now start up video and wait for everything to go slow. Type ^C to stop top again and copy / paste the top few lines etc.

Post what you get and we'll have a look see what that tells us.

@ Forester

Really good diagnostic idea. Hope your student complies.

As a reminder, flash often fills up .xsession errors pretty fast.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised at a memory problem caused by some
build-up like this, or in some cache like urlclassifierdb in FireFox.

Hi Forester, many thanks for the kind assistance. I am running Knoppix 6.2 with the LXDE desktop. Yesterday I updated the amd/ati radeon package and also installed VLC player. The result is that Videos now play great on VLC player and despite trying for several hours this morning I have been unable to cause the slowdown at all. Things are great just now, however gnomeplayer and mplayer continue to behave erratically. If I ever get the slowdown again I'll post the TOP findings.
Thanks again!