lowering hits to processor

[David Rysdam]

Susan Cragin <susancragin at earthlink.net> writes:
> This is probably mostly a wine problem. But I do what I can to help
> out: I have a fast machine with a solid-state drive and plenty of RAM,
> I have installed Lubuntu with the low-latency kernel, and disabled the
> zeitgeist logger. I don't open any programs I don't need. Any
> suggestions? Any other daemons I can axe? I need pulseaudio,

With plenty of RAM, the bottleneck among multiple programs is probably
just the CPU. How many do you have?

Also, a year or so ago my wife was complaining about a slow computer. I
wrote a script to just save the output of top every 60s and then grepped
through it after a few days. The killer turned out to be a spreadsheet,
which was (unbeknownst to us) running in an emulator. 

The point of that story isn't the spreadsheet. The point is to do some
logging and grepping. You can't fix what you can't measure.