Something just takes control of my system and I can do nothing about it!

[fireboy]

I am using Kubuntu 1404 LTD and KDE.

Is there an application that will tell me what is using up all my system resources?

Why I need such a program:

This dose not happen everyday but, two to three days a week, when it starts then it will
completely stop for awhile, I can't figure out what's going on!

What happens is, I'll boot up the system and everything is fine, give it about 5 mins. and bam,
it just comes to a stop. I click on something and about three or four mins later what I clicked
starts to work, mabye, or starts then stops like everything else. The entire time the lights
on the modem/router are going full bore.

Sometimes, it starts after I open the FireFox browser, this seems to trigger it more often,
and it just sits there and wont do anything. I have to use the reset button to stop it down!

I have tried to use Htop, but I don't understand what it's telling me, another reason to find
another program that can check the system at any given time and finding out what is going on.

Any help will be appreciated!

[dibl]

I have tried to use Htop, but I don't understand what it's telling me ...

What do you not understand about the htop table of processes? Processes are shown sorted in descending order of CPU usage. The process on "top" of the list is the one that is using the most CPU resources at the time of the display. Watch it for a minute or two, and it should become obvious which one is the bad actor.

[oshunluvr]

The way to check this IMO is to reboot, open a konsole and launch htop, then go about your business. Keep the konsole visible. Once the slow down begins, do as Dibl suggests and watch the top of this list. Another tool is iotop which monitors input-output processes.

[citizen]

I am using Kubuntu 1404 LTD and KDE.
This dose not happen everyday but, two to three days a week, when it starts then it will
completely stop for awhile, I can't figure out what's going on!

What happens is, I'll boot up the system and everything is fine, give it about 5 mins. and bam,
it just comes to a stop. I click on something and about three or four mins later what I clicked
starts to work, mabye, or starts then stops like everything else. The entire time the lights
on the modem/router are going full bore.
Any help will be appreciated!

I may be wrong but this sounds like updatedb running. On my system it is scheduled to check for updates daily at the same time of day. The other time it runs is right after I get on the system. Because my system is older and has low memory it slows everything down, just like what you are describing. It's a cron job built in to the settings.

When it happens hit Ctrl + Esc and System Monitor will open (very slowly), If you can click on the CPU % column to sort by highest CPU usage (again, this could go very slow). Or just scroll down and see if cron.updatedb (I think tha's the name) is running.

I am sure someone on here can explain how to change that setting. And possibly verify or correct me about the name of the process running cron.update.

I may be wrong but that's what happens on my system when it slows like that.

[oshunluvr]

You may be correct in that updatedb is slowing your system down, but updatedb is associated with locate (file finder) and has nothing to do with "updates" - which refers to software (package) updates.

If you look in /etc/cron.daily you'll see mlocate which refers to the command "updatedb.mlocate" which updates a list of files on your system. This command can be configured by editing /etc/updatedb.conf to exclude or include folders, file types, etc. If this is in fact causing your delay you might considering moving it to weekly or even turning it off completely and running it manually.

If updating the package list is causing your slow down, you'd see the "apt" command at work, which is activated by /etc/cron.daily/apt-compat.

[citizen]

Thank you for the correction, updatedb.mlocate is exactly what I was thinking of. It's been so long since I had to sit through it slowing everything down.