Vim pausing randomly for a minute or so at a time

Question

I'm running Linux Mint Maya 13.2 on a laptop from a USB stick, and SSHing onto that install from my own work computer.

When i'm editing a file with Vim, i keep getting a pause of about a minute where it becomes completely unresponsive. The cursor is blinking but i can't do anything. After a minute or two it comes back to normal, spontaneously.

This is not caused by me hitting Ctrl&S, eg like this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3419820/sometimes-my-file-just-freezes-in-my-vi-vim-what-happened

When it happens, i'm often using the cursors to navigate around the file.

I never see this pause at any other time when i'm ssh'd onto the other computer in this way: it only happens when i'm editing a file with vim. The version of Vim i'm using is

VIM - Vi IMproved
version 7.3.429  

Grateful for any suggestions! max

Answer 1

1. network conditions. To detect if your network conditions are good exit to shell on remote machine and hold any character key. If you see that character flow is unstable or 'hangs' you have network problems.
2. vim does autosave and target disk if NFS or something like that. To detect Either use sar to get data from the past or run vmstat in other ssh session to same server.
3. target server overload. exit shell and run uptime immediately after the 'hang'. If target machine has sysstat installed, sar is even better.