Why are some operations so brutally slow?

Ah. OK.

Now, I am seeing a very strange problem today. The system is at a crawl right now - possibly because I have a number of media files (videos, pics, etc) where I am having thumbnails generated, etc.

I got an error this morning that I had zero RAM in the NAS. Could that be due to bad memory? I ended up shutting the system down and put in different memory. But I’m still seeing this. I’m wondering if things are all slow due to all the background processing…