Extremely poor system performance during large file operations

[Jeffery Davis]

Running Intrepid Ibex 8.10 64-bit, I get extremely poor system performance whenever a large file operations are taking place. Examples are copying multiple gigs of files, moving multiple gigs of files, or unzipping very large archives. Firefox becomes unresponsive and/or dims every other minute, the package manager takes 3-4 times as long to install a new package, and so forth. I'm using Nautilus to copy the files, but I believe I tried a simple 'cp' in the terminal with similar results.

I have a pretty beefy system (C2D, 4 gigs of RAM, hard drive with 32mb cache) and this problem doesn't occur in Vista, so I'm stumped.

System monitor looks pretty normal even while usability is going into the toilet. Not much RAM or CPU used, no significant paging going on.

[cornbread (corn13read)]

I'm having the exact same issue!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Jeffery Davis, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, could you please test the latest upstream kernel available (not the daily folder, but the one at the top) following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds ? It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please comment on which kernel version specifically you tested. If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tags:
kernel-fixed-upstream
kernel-fixed-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

where VERSION-NUMBER is the version number of the kernel you tested. For example:
kernel-fixed-upstream-v3.13-rc4

This can be done by clicking on the yellow circle with a black pencil icon next to the word Tags located at the bottom of the bug description. As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the following tags:
kernel-bug-exists-upstream
kernel-bug-exists-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug's Status as Confirmed. Please let us know your results. Thank you for your understanding.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]