See also Bug 381300, Bug 131094 and others. There has been a lot of discussion from people far more knowledgeable about kernel issues and IO WAIT than I. The truly wacky thing here is that I see this problem in Karmic when doing nothing more than just TYPING. If I run LatencyTop, I've seen:
EXT3: Waiting for journal access 9959.4 msec 93.4 % I've tried switching to data=writeback, but that has not fixed the issue. I have run the fsync-tester, from http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309, and received figures such as: fsync time: 0.0293 fsync time: 0.0293 fsync time: 6.3766 fsync time: 0.0269 fsync time: 0.0258 fsync time: 0.6859 fsync time: 0.0255 fsync time: 0.0258 fsync time: 2.4765 fsync time: 0.0275 fsync time: 0.6968 fsync time: 1.7163 fsync time: 0.0270 fsync time: 0.0250 fsync time: 1.1506 fsync time: 0.6978 fsync time: 20.6614 fsync time: 0.0272 fsync time: 0.0278 fsync time: 0.0268 fsync time: 0.0329 fsync time: 0.0261 fsync time: 4.6135 fsync time: 1.9741 fsync time: 14.4094 fsync time: 0.8622 fsync time: 0.0273 fsync time: 0.0256 fsync time: 0.0354 fsync time: 0.0279 The larger numbers corresponding to times when the system is unresponsive. If I keeping typing while the system feels frozen, I can even get the Firefox windows to be marked gray until I stop typing and let the system recover. ** Bug watch added: Linux Kernel Bug Tracker #12309 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309 -- Multiple GUI apps freezing with high I/O wait during typing https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/417041 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs