I’ll give some clues, (alas with a story).
Until somewhat recently my primary PC was a 2009 dell desktop that had issues, esp. when using browsers chromium and firefox. My system would just drop to a crawl & it would often have taken far longer than 10 seconds for a CtrlAltT to open a qterminal… But initially I just had a system that ‘dropped to a crawl’ without a reason so I had to explore.
- my first step was RAM tests & some disk checks (SMART etc… as if using consumer grade drives (which come with longer warranties the drives get awfully slow when they’re getting old & are experiencing degraded performance on some areas of the disk; esp. spinning rust drives and don’t report errors as that would be a warranty claim) etc.
- next I looked for patterns, what was in RAM during these ‘seizures’… (for me this was about 8 apps that are always open)
- when I turned the system on (and it was fast) I’d open a terminal on the display and leave
htoprunning… It’s pretty light on resources so I wasn’t worried about it,qpsyou mention maybe as good but I have little experience with it sorry. I’d also login to a text terminal session (CtrlAltF4) & havehtoprunning there - checked for any clues in .crash files (in
/var/crash/) but none were evident to me at the times where the system crawled. - I would often switch to text terminal & watch the system, even when running perfectly, so I had something to contrast to when I had issues & could monitor changes
- explore system logs too for clues (
dmesgorjournalctl) too
Eventually I worked out either chromium or firefox had to be in memory for the issue to occur, and the issue was a likely a RAM leak where those apps were involved. Watching htop allowed me to find that out.
I removed the extensions I had on both browsers, then used the system normally for about 10 days and not once did I have an issue… Next I explored the extensions (particularly those I valued) and concluded it was either of two extensions.
My choice was to live without those extensions on a fast system, or use them & just recognize the issue before it became a problem & deal with it… I wanted the extensions so just worked around the issue & got pretty good at detecting when I was going to have an issue & corrected it before any slowness appeared… FYI: I’ve written about this before, eg. here and here as the issue I was experiencing is now dealt with differently on jammy (22.04 & later)
There are many tools we have available; top being the basic tool I used in the 1980s; htop a colorized version, iftop for looking at interface issues, iotop for IO, & heaps more… but htop is a good starting point in my view like your qps but I’d choose a terminal based one that you can also use in text terminal to ensure the GUI/desktop isn’t involved… My exploration included testing in other desktops (Xfce/GNOME & MATE) where the issue for me was identical so I could rule out LXQt’s involvement, for you a text terminal will be easiest I bet (ruling out LXQt/graphic/GUI issues).
No answer here sorry, just my 2c thoughts… I’ve ignored swap as you mention creating swap