Comment 83 for bug 363695

There is a second tweak to solve the problem, even in Ubuntu 10.10, suggested by Selanit in Ubuntu Forums (http://ohioloco.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10453047&postcount=15)

Until now, the fix above applies only to weekly cron job. But the fix below will apply to the daily cron job.

open this file as sudo : /etc/cron.daily/apt

Find this code:
if [ -x /usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index ]; then
            nice ionice -c3 update-apt-xapian-index -q
        fi

Then replace it by that:
if [ -x /usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index ]; then
            nice -n 19 ionice -c3 update-apt-xapian-index --update -q
        fi