Comment 78 for bug 620074

There is no performance improve in 2.6.24.7. The list below shows the average times of the 41 small jobs with the cfq scheduler. I have the best desktop responsiveness on 2.6.20. Gimp start on heavy I/O in 10 seconds instead of 30 seconds. The freezes of the applications exists on 2.6.20, but they are much shorter, mostly under one second, while in kernels >= 2.6.22 there are freezes till one minute.

                      min maxa avg stdev
2.6.20-17-generic 9.9 126.00 49.97 59.89
2.6.20 8.66 115.05 39.68 50.41
2.6.22.19 10.34 195.29 66.88 96.07
2.6.24.7 9.93 185.02 64.38 89.95

The high I/O wait is at 75% on the start and climbs to 99-100% after ~5 seconds.

I have noticed, that the freezes occurs in all applications more often, when firefox is running. Currently I create a ram disk on startup, extract the .mozilla folder to it and save it again on shutdown. I makes my system more responsive, especially firefox3.