Comment 9 for bug 1290337

another observation: i also run a few time apt-get update as others have used this as a benchmark. While not as slow as others have reported in bug 1107150, i did notice slow package reads of multiple minutes whereas a preceeding /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 could drop it to <20 seconds. Interestingly, though, in this case in both cases iostat reported 100% utilization during the package read!