Comment 330 for bug 131094

For me too every time I do an apt-get upgrade, I have to let the
machine there for a while because it becomes unusable. The mouse is
always freezing and everything is lagging with the iowait at avoir
80%.

I have a AMD Athlon 64 with 2 gigs of RAM and a SATA drive. Changed
the harddrive too and the problem is still there.

Very frustating.

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Jeremy Nickurak
<email address hidden> wrote:
> I'm having this issue too, with x86-64 Lucid.
>
> I'm on a 1.83Ghz Core2 Duo with 1.5gigs of ram, 2 gigs of swap, and a
> fast SATA hard drive.
>
> This feels very much what would happen with an old computer when DMA was
> disabled... but of course this is a SATA hard drive, and I don't know
> how to confirm if it's configured properly.
>
> It's plenty fast after a reboot, but at some point, it just gets barely
> usable. At apt-get upgrade will generally trigger it. Once it's there,
> it seems like a little hard drive IO and CPU just don't mix any more (as
> if DMA was disabled)
>
> --
> Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in The Linux Kernel: Invalid
> Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed
> Status in “linux-source-2.6.22” package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: linux-source-2.6.22
>
> When compared with 2.6.15 in feisty, heavy disk I/O causes increased iowait times and affects desktop responsiveness in 2.6.22
>
> this appears to be a regression from 2.6.15 where iowait is much lower and desktop responsiveness is unaffected with the same I/O load
>
> Easy to reproduce with tracker - index the same set of files with 2.6.15 kernel and 2.6.22 kernel and the difference in desktop responsiveness is massive
>
> I have not confirmed if a non-tracker process which does heavy disk i/o (especially writing) replicates this yet - will do further investigation soon
>
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