Need advice on performance troubleshooting

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Hi folks! :-)

I am experiencing a gradual performance drop problem --- having a machine 
running 24/7, after some time (say, two weeks) the system becomes increasingly 
slow, in terms of desktop response. It takes several seconds (cca 15-20) to 
open an "open file" dialog in a text editor, or a new terminal window or such. 
The window takes 2-4 seconds to gain focus after I click on it. If I move the 
mouse over a typical toolbar, it takes a second or two for the particular 
button to get highlighted, and the highlighting "rectangle" follows the mouse 
like 2-3 buttons behind. Clicking on a new message in KMail takes 1-3 seconds 
to actually display it. Most GUI stuff becomes increasingly (and annoyingly) 
slow.

There is enough processor power, according to top and other diagnostic tools. 
Besides, compiz happens to remain completely responsive --- cube, this, that, 
all effects are fast and snappy. Mplayer runs flawlessly. But the rest of the 
GUI starts to drag. The text selection in an editor follows the mouse with 1-3 
seconds delay. And such stuff...

On a freshly (re)booted system everything is fast and snappy for a couple of 
days, and then it gradually starts to get slower and slower. This coincides 
with increased usage of swap, which tends to rise from 0 to 1.2 GB in two 
weeks period. I suspect that swapping is partially the culprit for performance 
degradation, but I am unable to determine what app is using all that swap, and 
for what.

I would appreciate any pointers where to start looking for this swap drainage. 
Also, if I try to run the system without swap (disabling it manually right 
after boot), it starts to choke after some time, and I need to reboot it.

The hardware has 2GB RAM, 4 GB swap, core 2 duo @ 1.5 GHz.

I use the machine for usual desktop activities. Typically I have several apps 
running non-stop: firefox (3-4 tabs), kmail, ktorrent, kile, couple of konsole 
instances, two skype instances, cairo-dock, xmms and okular. The desktop is 
64bit F12, KDE, running compiz/emerald. I have several usual plasmoids on the 
desktop, nothing too fancy (clock, graphs for cpu, temperature, battery, 
network and RAM usage).

Occasionally I start other stuff (krusader, quake3, Wolfram's Mathematica, 
other infrequent things like photo editing stuff etc.) but I shut them down 
after usage. I notice the slowdown even if I don't use any of that.

The symptoms appear like something is leaking memory --- slowly (noticable 
only after two weeks of continuous running), but cumulatively. This triggers 
gradual swap usage, which then gradually decreases performance and 
responsiveness of the whole desktop.

I tried shutting down all desktop apps, and this releases some swap (but not 
all?!), but the system remains in a bad shape, which is visible if I (re)start 
any app again.

Things like mplayer run flawlessly, but it takes cca 15-20 seconds to start the 
Konsole from which I can invoke mplayer.

Once I left the system running unattended for a month (I wasn't at home), and 
I accessed it only via ssh a couple of times (without problems). When I got 
back, the desktop was so slow and unresponsive that I couldn't even wait for 
it to do a regular shutdown/restart, and instead I pulled the plug and 
rebooted it fresh.

When I try to shut down a multi-tab app (firefox, kile, konsole), it takes so 
much time to close itself that I get a dialog saying that the app is not 
responding (and offering to terminate it). If I just wait, eventually both the 
dialog and the app close themselves. It can take them from 5 seconds to half a 
minute do close, depending on the shape of the rest of the desktop.

I'm at a loss where and how to look for memory and performance drain. My 
current uptime is

$ uptime
 02:04:55 up 14 days,  4:54,  6 users,  load average: 0.62, 0.55, 0.39

and I can feel the slowdown quite easily. I'd be happy to hear any advice on 
how to troubleshoot this, before I get pissed off and reboot the system again. 
I'll also gladly provide any additional info.

Thanks, :-)
Marko


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