I experience the same issue on my ThinkPad X61 running Lucid 64-bit on both 2.6.32-23 and 2.6.34 mainline from http://kernel.ubuntu.com /~kernel-ppa/mainline/.
A simple `dd if=/dev/zero of=big.file bs=1M count=1500' reproduces the problem. What's interesting is that applications are responsive up until the point where the memory is filled up with cache, after which applications becomes unresponsive and the system extremely slow. I've tried to reduce the swappiness to 20 without any noticeable results. I'm going to give 2.6.35-rc1 a try now, to see if there are any improvements. -- Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs