Public bug reported:
This isn't something that just started in Jaunty, but it is something
that has been getting progressively worse in each release - it's now at
the point now where I have to report it (I probably should have reported
this ages ago).
Doing anything that involves high disk I/O causes desktop responsiveness
to go through the floor, to the point where the machine is virtually
unusable. For example, I run VMWare quite a bit. If I do anything disk
intensive from the guest VM, then it can take ~20-30 seconds (and
sometimes nearly a whole minute) just to open a new gnome-terminal on
the host. During this time, the mouse cursor stutters, and sometimes
pauses for several seconds at a time.
Compiz will also regularly fade all open windows to grayscale during
times of high disk activity, indicating that the applications crashed.
They recover after a few seconds of this happening.
I can recreate the same using tracker to index my disk. As soon as
tracker starts indexing, the whole machine grinds to a halt. This is
despite the fact that tracker-indexer is ionice'd in Jaunty.
I've attached a screenshot of top on the host machine, whilst I was
updating some packages in my virtual guest. You can see the 70% iowait
(this is on a dual core Opteron). The high iowait corresponds to the
desktop responsiveness dropping off. Note that when I took this
screenshot, it took just over a minute for the screenshot dialog to
appear on the screen.
** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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High disk I/O brings my machine to its knees
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/342360
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