Comment 598 for bug 595047

(In reply to comment #561)
> > It seems to be fixed in 3.2.
> Somewhere in parallel universe I think.

There are multiple issues that can lead to a behaviour like the one that is discussed in this bug.

A few patches that went into 3.2 make some situation better. But some problems were still known back then; see http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/

Fixes for those went into 3.3-rc1. Quoting from this weeks LWN.net kernel page (I'm quite sure Jonathan won't mind):

"""
There have been some significant changes made to the memory compaction code to avoid the lengthy stalls experienced by some users when writing data to slow devices (USB keys, for example). This problem was described in this article (http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/), but the solution has evolved considerably. By making a number of changes to how compaction works, the memory management hackers (and Mel Gorman in particular) were able to avoid disabling synchronous compaction, which had the unfortunate effect of reducing huge page usage. See this commit (
http://git.kernel.org/linus/a77ebd333cd810d7b680d544be88c875131c2bd3 ) for a lot of information on how this problem was addressed.
"""

IOW: Best to test 3.3-rc and report bugs if there are still issues.

While at it (and with a view from someone that is not very active in this bug tracker): I'd say opening a new bug and mentioning it here in this report might be the best way forward for any remaining issues, as the long history might be misleading/confusing when it comes to solving today's bugs. Just my 2 cent.