Many apps become unresponsive in after a while in 10.04

Can you attach the output of top when this happens again?

Rebooted Saturday, now on Tuesday it is suddenly slower after waking from suspend. 'man' took 14 seconds to show a page the first time, almost instantaneous the second time. Similarly, Synaptic took 30 seconds to show the first time, almost instantaneous the second time. F-Spot was 46 seconds 1st time, 1 second 2nd time. Watching top, there was no change in swap memory reported during startup of any of these. Desktop apps open: skype, ooffice, firefox, gnome terminal, evolution, emacs. top shows:

top - 11:19:00 up 2 days, 13:50, 3 users, load average: 2.28, 2.07, 1.64
Tasks: 182 total, 2 running, 180 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.8%us, 4.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 43.3%id, 44.8%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2051976k total, 1836400k used, 215576k free, 295264k buffers
Swap: 2048276k total, 744k used, 2047532k free, 963580k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 2570 newmarch 20 0 61596 15m 11m S 7 0.8 0:23.68 gnome-terminal
 1129 root 20 0 110m 39m 16m S 6 2.0 18:42.17 Xorg
 1824 newmarch 20 0 231m 65m 21m S 2 3.3 18:05.95 skype
 1608 newmarch 20 0 147m 34m 9184 S 2 1.7 5:27.22 compiz
  942 messageb 20 0 3364 1800 820 S 2 0.1 0:34.81 dbus-daemon
  956 root 20 0 19128 4336 3428 S 2 0.2 0:29.67 NetworkManager
 6814 newmarch 20 0 229m 95m 69m S 1 4.8 1:22.88 soffice.bin
 2512 newmarch 20 0 412m 137m 29m S 1 6.9 24:58.73 firefox-bin
 2680 newmarch 20 0 47708 20m 11m S 1 1.0 3:09.37 emacs
 9004 newmarch 20 0 2544 1248 924 R 0 0.1 0:01.31 top
    1 root 20 0 2796 1568 1200 S 0 0.1 0:00.78 init
    2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.14 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
    9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.20 events/0
   11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
   12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
   13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
   14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr
   15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 pm
   17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 sync_supers
   18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 bdi-default
   19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
   21 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.06 kblockd/0
   23 root 20 0 0 0 0 S...

My system has now been up for 6 days with no occurrence of the problem. Maybe one of the upgrades I have done has cured it. So it looks like the problem has been fixed, whatever it was.

Sigh, the problem has come back again. I use suspend on lid close, and it seems to happen on wake from suspend. Before suspend everything is fine, after wake it often (about 1/4 of the time) has this speed problem. Current kernel: 2.6.32-24-generic #38-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jul 5 09:22:14 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]