Unix pc sluggishness when switching windows

[Augustine Cano]

My 3b1 had been up for more than a month, without any reboots.  At some
point I had the feeling that it was really slow when changing windows, via
<SHIFT><SUSPEND> or <SHIFT><RESUME> (I'm running 3.51m).  It looked like
a lot of swapping, sometimes taking more than 5 seconds to get to the
next/previous window.  Of course the disk was hard at work in this period.

Oh well, thought I, time to add RAM (I have 2 MB on the mother-board), but
then I thought it wasn't this slow before, so I ran a test.

With 3 windows open (through the UA), with nothing but shells in each of
them, I tested response time.  Then I rebooted.  Three ksh windows, as
before, but now trn running in one, elm on another and page on the third.
You wouldn't believe the difference!  window switching is now almost
instantaneous, like it used to be.
Not only that, but after the reboot 2 more daemons were started that were
not there before: cron and mthreads.

So, what is slowly degrading in the kernel that is fixed at boot time?
Has anybody else noticed this?  Does anybody have a clue as to what it is?

-- 
Augustine Cano		INTERNET: afc at shibaya.lonestar.org
			UUCP:     ...!{ernest,egsner}!shibaya!afc