My knoppix flash drive install seems to get slower and slower

I like to run a knoppix system off of a flash drive, but it has tended to get slower and slower over time.

Perhaps I just don't have enough memory on this old notebook (it only has 2GB).

Maybe the iceweasel/firefox history files get too big. I like keeping my history though.

I see the flash drive flicker quite a bit at times and sometimes iceweasel will just take forever to load a page.

It does run though and will return to normal eventually.


edit: Maybe the flash drive is a little bit screwy. I had to fix some corruption in the persistent image with fsck.ext2. Also there was some corruption in the vfat partition where knoppix-data.img resides that fsck.vfat couldn't fix. It told me the fat table and the backup didn't match and presented me with options to take one or the other, but no matter which one I chose, it wouldn't make any modifications.