Recently a friend mentioned a problem when typing into his web browser, which was at that time, Firefox. I suggested that I had come across the problem, but since using Flashpeak Slimjet for my browsing it was not happening. That seemed to be right, but recently the problem returned, so I did some investigating. I'm writing about it here, because the problem WILL come back, and I WILL forget about the solution.
I went through various fault finding routines, and thought I had found the answer when I replaced the cordless mouse and keyboard batteries with fresh ones. So I checked with my mate and he confirmed that he uses wired mouse and keyboard. So obviously that wasn't the problem.
What was happening varied, but as an example, sometimes if I typed womething like 'www.news.com.au' into a browser address bar, I might only get 'www.ne ', then nothing else for ages and if I waited I might get 'ws.com.au' all in one go. Other times I might get 'www.neeeews.coooom' then nothing for a while.
And it wasn't just in browsers. Trying to type in Blogger or in my word processor could also result in something similar.
Eventually I started looking at things that might be slowing the system, and realised I had a 500MB Internal hard drive spinning, but I also had FOUR 1TB USB external drives running. Then I remembered that some years ago file indexing was causing performance problems on my computers. Sometimes Linux just decided to index part of the file system because it thinks there is nothing exciting happening for a while.
So I unplugged all the external USB drives and for the last few hours the computer has been running like a brand new one. At some point I will start plugging in all the 1TB drives again and see if that causes the problem again. If it does, I will try removing one drive at a time to see if the problem is dependent on how hard the system is loaded up, whether the problem is a large quantity of files being indexed, or simply a hardware problem with too many drives or with one particular drive.
Anyway, it might not be the same cause as my mate's computer problem, but thus far it seems to be the cause of the same problem occurring on my system.
