My box got slow, what should be my first steps?

[Jan]

Hello,

with every upgrade from B1 my system got a little more stable, but also quite a bit slower (overall). Recently the system also freezes quite often and I have to wait a few minutes for it to handle the queued inputs from my remote (then suddenly quickly, which is always a source of amusement by itself, or even better with a few minutes to pass between individual queue items). Sometimes both during playback and during xbmc handling xbms drops back to the shell. Often the box does not respond anymore via ssh and I have to pull the plug.
Usually things get better, after it ran a while (start of video playback is faster), but gets worse once the box has had nothing to do for a while.

I have transmission service running in the backgrou[/size]nd but no active torrents during playback. It did not seem to make things a lot better whe I stopped the service.

I would want to try some basic steps such as reinstalling xbmc (I have the impression this is more xbmc related than to raspian). Is there some place where I could read up such standard procedures?

I've got a 256MB Model B, RC2, running from an external hd, connected via wifi.

dmesg http://pastebin.com/Zi4JtYKq
top http://pastebin.com/2xx9LmWx
vstat http://pastebin.com/CRfeAGAt