Alright, I have run some more tests:

I copy a file in my (unencrypted, ext4, on root partition) homedir with:

dd if=testfile_8gb of=testfile_out status=progress

(I made the testfile using dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile_8gb bs=1M
count=8000 status=progress)

While running this Xorg/Gnome3/Mouse/Any UI application becomes
unresponsive for seconds at a time, with intervals of a few seconds
where everything is responsive. The write speed of dd often starts
somewhere between 200 and 100 mb/s and then dips all the way to around
35, after which the dd process completely locks up. (I think this is
because the process gets stuck into some kind of iowait state, I deduced
this from some quick peeks at KSysGuard, citation needed). After a few
minutes the dd process suddenly finishes and the UI becomes responsive
again. Copying the file through nautilus has similar behaviour.

Disabling intel_pstate via the kernel boot parameters
(intel_pstate=disabled) did not have any effect (except for indeed
disabling intel_pstate).

Doing some tweaks to the vm dirty bytes settings had no significant
effect (making the mouselag more of a jitter, but still unusable).

Disabling the swapfile (19.10 has a swapfile instead of swap partition
by default) however completely mitigated the issue!

If some people are willing to try to reproduce this we might be able to
get something going:

- Open some Youtube video in Firefox (something that lets you see if the UI 
lags)
- next to that open two terminals, in one terminal start the dd process as 
described above
- The ui should be lagging now, mouse doesn't move for seconds at a time, 
youtube video severaly lags/hangs/jitters
- in the second unused terminal run 'sudo swapoff /swapfile'
- For me the lag immediately stops
- Killing the dd process/letting it finish and then starting a new one works 
perfectly, much higher writespeeds (and more stable)
- enable swag again with 'sudo swapon /swapfile'
- Lag returns completely

I am really curious if this works for others. Maybe this is an entirely
different issue, for which I will file a bugreport if nobody can
reproduce this.

Thanks in advance!

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1208993

Title:
  Ubuntu slows down and hangs while copying file from/to USB

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