Comment 255 for bug 131094

@cornbread: I think they've put the 'no new fair sleepers' patch into ubuntu's 2.6.31 kernel, which does help with responsiveness (though it slows down some high-CPU tasks like games). This might explain it.

However, I noticed a massive drop in responsiveness yesterday while copying 14GB to a flash drive, including a frozen mouse cursor for up to thirty seconds. Although atop showed that my internal hard drive (/dev/sda) was only being used very lightly (as you'd expect when copying to flash), it was thrashing away constantly. So there are still some issues.