Comment 8 for bug 112484

I beleive this is related to bug #236141 (see my comment there) and that it's the kernel which simply prioritizes I/O operations. In the kernel team people have left frustrated over this and the unwillingness from the team to do anything about it.

Sebastian, what should be done, in my opinion, is for the kernel team to design the kernel so that it can be run in different modes - at least desktop and server modes - so that user interfaces like video, sound, mouse, keyboard are prioritized in the desktop mode, and file I/O in the server mode. Further, it should be possible for the user to switch between modes at kernel startup. No recompilation should be necessarry for this to work. In the mean time, until the kernel team admits this has to be done (which probably will never happen), the Ubuntu kernel team should consider patching the kernel themselves.