Lucid: Excessive disk activity when unpacking packages

[Mark Dammer]

Binary package hint: dpkg

The "unpacking" stage causes loads of rattling disk activity when installing packages with dpkg on Lucid. Because of this problem the package installation takes much longer and puts much more stress on the harddisk than on Karmic or Hardy. I am observing this on several machines - the problem is much more obvious on slower machines.
This is not related to faulty harddrives - I am observing it on three machines with different HDs. The rattling sound makes me think that the problem might be related to improper caching and dpkg trying to operate on the disk blockwise.
I am not observing similar problems with other applications.

[Steffen Banhardt (steffenbanhardt)]

Did you clean the packet cache? Try

sudo apt-get autoclean

in a terminal, this helped me from heavy disk access

[Mark Dammer (mark-dammer)]

Package cache is empty - problem persists. I wonder if this bug is related to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/570805

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Yes it is very likely related. It would help us if you could test the package mentioned at https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/570805/comments/14 and paste the output of the test before and after the installation of the PPA version as well as your storage configuration (type of disks, type of RAID, filesystem type and mount options)
Check comment #16 to see how to run a test. the ts command is in the package 'moreutils'

Thanks in advance.