Comment 274 for bug 131094

I believe that this problem can be alleviated by using Con Kolivas's BFS scheduler instead of the stock scheduler. There are PPAs on Launchpad where you can get kernels with the BFS scheduler for Lucid and Karmic. On my system, it really seems to make the system much more reponsive. I hope that the Linux kernel team consider including the BFS scheduler as an option in future kernel releases, and until then I think the Ubuntu team should consider making a BFS kernel the default for the desktop version of Ubuntu.