[Bug 131094] Re: Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness

[psypher]

Please could the severity/importance of this bug be raised. I would
consider a bug which has been prevalent for almost 3 years, which caused
extreme slowdown of the entire desktop when there is any kind of high
disk activity, to be pretty serious. This drastically affect my usage
and productivity of the desktop on a daily basis. Up until this time I
have always thought it's just how linux is and the benefit of all the
other great features outweighs a bit of slow down. Well it seems to be
getting worse and as I start to use even more of the potential of my
PC's I am getting a little tired of it. Recently been testing ubuntuone
extensively and I suspect a big portion of my extremely slow index and
read issues, of the thousands of files I have in my ubuntuone folder, is
actually caused by this bug. Although there are still some improvements
which could be made in that process which the ubuntuone team are
actively working on and doing some great work. There at least someone is
working on big issues but sadly it seems only due to the commercial
potential of ubuntuone.

This seems to be a kernel issue as per this bug report: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309
But the status of that bug is confusing as it's marked as closed due to insufficient information.

Does anyone know who is working this? I have attempted to contact the
person assigned as well as Ben Gamari, who I see is subscribed to this
bug on launchpad as well, for some clarification. I will patiently wait
their response. What testing needs to be done and what can be done from
a non-developers perspective to fix this.

IMO this is the worst bug in linux right now and I think a bit more
attention must be brought to it, more than just a slashdot article:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/049201

I would not recommend Ubuntu or Linux to any new users until this bug is
fixed. It is embarrassing when trying to praise all the benefits of
using linux to a Windows user when their entire desktop locks up when
trying to do simple things like run a backup or unrar a file.

In the past I have attributed slowness issues in several other
applications as application specific problems. There have been bugs
logged for:

Unison, Firefox, downthemall FF plugin, unrar, ubuntuone, flash, gnome,
VMWare, Virtualbox, qemu and kvm etc etc.

I think all of these issues could be attributed to this one problem.
There are too many apps that experience slowness and grey outs for it
not to be related. this happens between disks or on the same disk,
between disk type like usb, ide or sata. So we must not confuse the
problem. If there is any kind of disk IO the machine freezes. As the bug
above says: Large I/O operations result in slow performance and high
iowait times. That is the problem as far I can tell.

I offer any help required to fix this bug. Just let me know what i need
to do. But please lets raise the importance. This is a critical issue,
not medium.

Thanks guys, keep up the great work, linux still rocks :)

-- 
Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
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