Allocating space for large file results in program hanging with 100% CPU usage

[Mihai Capotă]

Allocating space for large file results in program hanging with 100% CPU usage. I experienced this in both transmission and rtorrent with various files 4 - 6 GB in size. When the allocation starts, I see a lot of disk activity but after a while this activity stops while the program keeps using 100% of the CPU. I left rtorrent running overnight in this state and it doesn't recover.
Furthermore, I can't kill the programs, even with SIGKILL. Actually, transmission dies, but becomes a zombie.
I think I should mention I'm using ecryptfs on my home partition as set up by the Ubuntu installer.

Here's a forum thread discussing this issue:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1216636

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: ubuntu-desktop 1.140
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=ro_RO:ro:en_GB:en
 LANG=ro_RO.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-meta
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-17-generic i686

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

I updated to Karmic today and the problem seems to have gone away. I only tried one file (6.6 GB) in transmission and, while the program freezes for a couple of minutes while the file space is being allocated, it recovers and functions normally. Will report back after more experiments.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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