Normally my N9 runs pretty great. Every once and a while an app will freeze and it asks me to close the app or not.

Very rarely does the whole phone lock up (maybe a few times in the years I have had it).

BUT lately it seems to freezes up where nothing responds and if you push the screen lock button nothing happens and I have to restart it.

Anyone else notice this happening more lately?

I havent installed any apps or changed my usage in a long time.

I tried clearing out some memory and erasing stuff like SMS/MMS and web private data.

I looked at my resource monitor and at idle everything looks to be about 0

There may be many causes for this behavior. You could try to restore settings as follows:

Settings -> Reset -> Restore settings

This will restore a lot of configuration files, so you will lose a few settings.

I had been considering starting fresh, but since all Nokia stuff has been shuttered I am really hesitant (I am a n00b when it comes to all the programming and stuff)

it took alot just to get it to how I like it with the apps and what not.

Will the restore settings get rid of any apps or data within the apps?

I dont care if it deletes my contacts or messages/emails from the device

No, it is mostly things like passwords for Wifi and email accounts and some display settings.

Hmm, just guessing.

What about disk usage. And I do not mean free space but number of inodes! To be checked with
df -i

Mine does that too. But really rarely.
My disk usage is about 90% used (always get the warning). But inodes are not close to limit.

I have not really much music or pics on device. So possibly lots of small thumbnails?
But, again, just guessing...

I had been having what seems the same problem (things like tapping the app screen, but the screen freezing for a few seconds and then going into Edit Mode with the red crosses over the apps, key popups freezing, key clicks not registering and then hearing them all at once) in the end I took the plunge and just reflashed my N9. Unfortunately I wasn't able to put in Open Mode while I was at it, but at least now it seems to be solved. I hope just doing a system reset is enough for you. However, I seriously suspect of MeeCast. It's the only app I haven't reinstalled but before the reflash it always shown "no data" or a red X over it on the Event Feed.

Slow downs in the user interface are often caused by too low amount of free cache memory. One can see the memory status with Drop Cache:

https://openrepos.net/content/hooddy/drop-cache

If the amount of free memory is too low, it is time to reboot the device.

BentL, the Drop Cache fix worked for me!

I've been wondering myself if I've just got too much stored in the tracker sparql database. I seem to see my slowdowns and unresponsive apps when new items are being added, like incoming SMSs and new pictures I've just taken. It seems crazy that a database in 2016 would have trouble with just a few thousand entries, but I can't help thinking that it's just got poor index performance. WAG, I admit.

But the cache thing is an interesting alternate theory. I'm gonna try that myself and hopefully prove myself wrong about the DB.

Edit: BentL, what constitutes too low? I see memory free 163 of 885 mb and swap free 188 of 255 mb, but I don't know what it should be for optimum performance.

Hi.
During the last weeks I've had problems with the xsession/sysuid service. In /var/log/syslog there where plenty of messages indicating a Floating Point Exception and respawning the service. I first blamed the nand chip going nuts, but then I bravely (read: lazily)run the fsck command over /home and the problems are gone. Only after doing this my /home/user folder was gone and had to recover contacts and settings for all the aps. I think you can try this,only using ubiboot kernel so that you don't savage your filesystem as I did..
However I'll not assume any responsibility
Regards.