Frantic disk activity by check-new-release makes system temporarily almost unusable

[halfbeing]

A little while ago my system suddenly became extremely slow, to the point of being unusable for normal work. This went on for several minutes. The disk light was on constantly. On running iotop I discovered that the main culprit was a ".../check-new-release -q" process. This is one of many programs that periodically cause excessive disk reading/writing and bring my system to its knees for periods typically lasting several minutes. Together they constitute a massive usability problem.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.192.12
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-29.21-lowlatency 3.8.13.5
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-29-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8.3
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Mon Sep 2 13:16:36 2013
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-08-22 (10 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Studio 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The following changes in Trusty should improve the situation.

  * Utilize new downloaded event from update-manager thereby speeding up usage
    of MetaReleaseCore. Thanks to Anders Kaseorg for the patch.

[sfc (sfc-0)]

Just ran into this problem on a Ubuntu 16.04.2 server, the check-new-release process occupied the whole disk, causing 99+% iowait in top and 100+MiB/s disk read in iotop (normal HDD, not SSD), which almost freeze the server.

kernel 4.4.0-33-generic

11:48:21 up 209 days, 16:33, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.77, 0.68

              total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 990 790 65 30 134 34
Swap: 495 495 0

After killed the check-new-release process, the server recovered from freezing.