I think you're missing some diagnostic info that is easy to get.
Install the "htop" program, and leave it running in a terminal window.
When things seem to suddenly get slow, go to your "htop" terminal window
(if you can), and look at what the RAM and swap usage bars say, and
which processes seem to be using the most memory and CPU at time of the
incident. There are many things that could be going wrong, but "htop"
will cover some of the most likely ones, without you having to look at
log files or core dumps.
When you're looking at the top of the "htop" window, you want your peak
RAM (labed "Mem") use to be less than 100%, your typical RAM use to be
under, say, 50%, and you want little-to-no swap (labeled "Swp") use (if
you have swap enabled at all).
Neil V.
Patrick King wrote at 05/02/2013 05:19 PM:
Still having a hard time catching Racket or Ubuntu "in the act".
Fortunately, this is at least in part because I haven't had many
crashes lately.
One thing that seems to happen fairly consistently is that I end up
waiting a lot on the background syntax expansion. Sometimes Racket
recovers. Sometimes it crashes (or perhaps Ubuntu is shutting it down
-- it's trying to send error reports, but can't figure out exactly
what Racket is). Since turning the expansion off, I haven't had a crash.
Not saying it's Racket's fault, or Ubuntu's, just that it's so...
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