Public bug reported: Sometime, more or less every 3-4 minutes or when I start a new program, with a relatively light load (chromium browser, thunderbird, one VirtualBox session) the computers went into frenzy disk activity and grind to a practical halt for the next minute or so. Very unresponsive, triggers the "this page do not respond" warning from chrome or OOffice... then it resume. I tried to track the culprit without any luck. Reducing vm.swappiness from 60 to 10 did not help. Cumulative atop for disk usage says:
NPROCS SYSCPU USRCPU VSIZE RSIZE RDDSK WRDSK RNET SNET MEM CMD 1/4 1 1.06s 0.08s 1.0G 836.0M 280 480 0 0 42% VirtualBox 8 0.07s 0.25s 1.2G 174.7M 232 0 0 0 9% chrome 1 0.03s 0.13s 246.6M 112.0M 0 0 0 0 6% Xorg 1 0.00s 0.02s 340.5M 74156K 15072 8 0 0 4% thunderbird-bi 1 0.00s 0.00s 93692K 9256K 0 0 0 0 0% nautilus 1 0.01s 0.01s 48844K 5616K 1184 24 0 0 0% gnome-terminal 1 0.00s 0.00s 41928K 5136K 0 0 0 0 0% wnck-applet and free: (0)pern:~% free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2027004 1977144 49860 0 1184 50012 -/+ buffers/cache: 1925948 101056 Swap: 3903752 342976 3560776 This is a Dell n-series, core2 cpu, 2G ram, running a 32 bit kernel, ATI card with fglrx module. Never happened such a thing with Karmic, same load (I know, virtualbox use half of the memory, but that was the same in Karmic, with no problem at all). The system is pretty unusable for work. Will try to reboot in an older kernel, using firefox, and downgrade virtualbox to try to find why, but if anyone has a suggestion, it's very welcome. ** Affects: ubuntu Importance: Undecided Status: New -- lucid lynx going into disk activity frenzy, stalls for minutes https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/582264 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