My one year N810 is starting to be a bit sluggish when starting up applications, etc and I am curious to see what, if anything, can be done to get it back to its former speed,

I assume a re-flash is the first thing to try but before doing so are there any cleanup tools/commands I can run in Diablo too see if something can be achieved that way?

Also, is there a diagnostics tool available that would be able to do a chkdsk and if so what stats should I be looking at to determine if a re-flash is the most appropriate action?

I've done a lot of customization in terms of the desktop but avoided real heavy CPU hogs like constant cpu moniters, etc so the main hesitation is just the time it would take to get me 'back' how it looks now. Hence...trying to avoid a re-flash if possible (read: I'm lazy).

Do you have a lot of movies and/or music?

I've noticed that the metalayer-crawler tends to be my biggest problem once I start adding more stuff to my device.

I tend to stop that service from starting and just manually locate my own stuff for myself when I want to hear or view it.

Also, a quick round of apt-get remove/apt-get clean/apt-get autoremove/apt-get autoclean while in as root to clear out some other things.

I've also manually enable my own app catalogs on my own (once weekly, I manually check for updates) and then disable them again.

And doing this kind of stuff, I'm about one year deep and it's not slowing down this time.

No music, one movie.

Thanks for the cleanup commands I can never remember them - time to write 'em down after I try them out tonight.

I do have a lot of app catalogs. Maybe it's time to disable some of them.

Mine hasn't slowed ever.
First thing to do, disable metalayer-crawler. Second, have enough free space in the root filesystem. Third, do not run python based desktop applets.
You can avoid a reflash, just clone your system to mmc.

I'm not familiar with the function of this metalayer-crawler. Let me try and ask this. I use my N810 as my mp3 player in the car, and whats worse, mainly play podcasts, so the content of that directory is constantly changing. Would that tend to make the metalayer crawler use up more resources?

I just stopped the process, but wanted to see if that was possibly the cause for the lower performance, and not that I was just imagining it.

Regarding metalayer-crawler:
1. How do you disable it?
2. What do you loose when it's disabled?

You mean you just open XTerm and do
without anything telling the system what to remove? That's the whole of the command?

Then, assuming you're already in root, you just enter

? And then the remaining two, one at a time. And that's it?

I believe they just clean out your tmp folders but I'd also like a more comprehensive explanation of what it cleans as well

See
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=18644

I did #3 in the first post, long long ago.

Judging from the comment by GA, maybe it stops the built-in media player from indexing your media. But I never use that player except when it's launched by another program or from the File Manager, so I wouldn't notice.

Since I have no fear (read: no sense) I ran all the commands int the order below. I started with an internal free memory of 9.9 Meg:

1) apt-get remove
2) apt-get autoremove

Memory went down to 9.1


3) apt-get clean
Memory now 11.1

4) apt-get autoclean
Memory now 11.2

Memory on mmc2 stayed the same at approx 350Meg free.

Will see if this makes any difference