[Bug 582264] [NEW] lucid lynx going into disk activity frenzy, stalls for minutes

Tue May 18 18:05:11 UTC 2010

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Sometime, more or less every 3-4 minutes or when I start a new program, with a relatively light load (chromium browser, thunderbird, one VirtualBox session) the computers went into frenzy disk activity and grind to a practical halt for the next minute or so. Very unresponsive, triggers the "this page do not respond" warning from chrome or OOffice... then it resume. 
I tried to track the culprit without any luck. Reducing vm.swappiness from 60 to 10 did not help. Cumulative atop for disk usage says: 

    NPROCS  SYSCPU  USRCPU  VSIZE  RSIZE  RDDSK WRDSK RNET SNET  MEM CMD     1/4   
     1   1.06s   0.08s   1.0G 836.0M    280   480    0    0  42% VirtualBox
     8   0.07s   0.25s   1.2G 174.7M    232     0    0    0   9% chrome
     1   0.03s   0.13s 246.6M 112.0M      0     0    0    0   6% Xorg
     1   0.00s   0.02s 340.5M 74156K  15072     8    0    0   4% thunderbird-bi
     1   0.00s   0.00s 93692K  9256K      0     0    0    0   0% nautilus   
     1   0.01s   0.01s 48844K  5616K   1184    24    0    0   0% gnome-terminal
     1   0.00s   0.00s 41928K  5136K      0     0    0    0   0% wnck-applet   

and free:

(0)pern:~% free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2027004    1977144      49860          0       1184      50012
-/+ buffers/cache:    1925948     101056
Swap:      3903752     342976    3560776

This is a Dell n-series, core2 cpu, 2G ram, running a 32 bit kernel, ATI card with fglrx module.

Never happened such a thing with Karmic, same load (I know, virtualbox
use half of the memory, but that was the same in Karmic, with no problem
at all).

The system is pretty unusable for work.

Will try to reboot in an older kernel, using firefox, and downgrade
virtualbox to try to find why, but if anyone has a suggestion, it's very
welcome.

** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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lucid lynx going into disk activity frenzy, stalls for minutes 
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bugs/582264
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