Comment 123 for bug 762918

Just like appier, I have experienced this with Xubuntu 11.10 too. I'm therefore not in a hurry to blame Compiz. I moved to Xubuntu because my performance with the regular Ubuntu / Unity mix on one PC led to slowdowns (fewer complete lockups).

I'm trying the power management tricks, as I think that is the most likely, and ties with my experience so far.

Add to this some other triggers based on the discussion:

1) in the past I've had some nasty experiences with ecryptfs home directory encryption causing OpenOffice / Libre Office failures and other nastiness.
2) things only seem to get bad once I start hitting the page file (too much Gimp work)
3) if I get to Ctrl Alt F1, then after a few minutes I get a message that Chrome is being killed (or at least certain windows within the browser) since it appears to have run away
4) similarly, Thunderbird gives me messages about long running scripts
5) CPU may not always run away, but if I do sudo iotop then I'll see kswapd0 hogging the system (or possibly just indicating that something else is desperately trying to switch / fork and failing?)
6) I also run Banshee a lot
7) Flash performance is dire on this PC (surprised? not really)

I was trying to blame Chrome or Thunderbird, but I think this is either ecryptsfs (again), power management on this Intel barebones system, or some scary background process that doesn't report failures in dmesg.

Details:

Intel Atom 4 core w/ 2GB RAM
Intel 945GC onboard graphics
Intel ICH7 South Bridge
Kernel: 3.0.0-16-generic