You have 8GB RAM and 1 hard drive. Given the symptoms you described, I'm wondering if your system is relying heavily on swap due to memory constraints? Your swap partition being on the same drive as your system and data files would mean that access to swap could be impacted by other disk I/O and lead to slowdowns or freezes.
2 solutions to this. Increase system RAM and/or Install a second hard drive and move swap partition to this new drive.
I misread this as a 12kT pork impact and was wondering how the pigs got into space.