I'm using Ubuntu 12.
Google maps are very slow on my laptop, but even when I close browser (Chrome or Chromium), the performance goes down significantly. It stops every 3-4 seconds for about a second, so works in kind of jerks. This holds until I reboot. Wasn't able to find anything suspicious in system monitor, all four cores are used to <15%, memory usage is ~20%, so all far from full use. No any jumps as well, it just stops for a fraction of a second and gets back... And again and again.
What might be the problem?