[ale] Long lag for command line

[Alex Carver]

Anyone ever experience long lags for simple things at the command line? 
  Right now I've got a Debian system that had been working fine but for 
some reason now it takes it a few seconds to do something simple like 
open vi or cat a file -- not even big files, just a few kilobytes or 
less.  The load average is 1.5 but top doesn't show anything really 
hitting the CPU.  No cron jobs running at the time, the machine is 
mostly quiet.  It just handles a few internal activities for me 
(internal web server, place to compile little things, etc).