I have done a little more poking around. I'm becoming even more convinced it's a kernel issue.
I installed 3.5.7-991-generic #201304060456 from the Kernel Team's mainline PPA. Along with this, I have continued to use anonymous_hugepage and the CFQ scheduler. I nearly dropped the machine when I rebooted. I didn't accurately time the difference, but there was easily a 30%-40% speed-up in boot time and login to KDE 4.10.2. Combine this with my earlier use of anonymous_hugepages and the CFQ scheduler, and my performance has increased by at least 50%-60%. The only other change which may be a consideration, since I installed the vanilla kernel, could be that I'm no longer using the backported wireless stack. When I have a little time in the next couple of days, I'm going to try the mainline version of 3.5.0-26-generic from the PPA. Perhaps this may narrow things down. Can anyone tell me if it might be worthwhile to go so far as to try a 13.04 kernel build? I'm not going to face a totally broken system, if I do, will I? -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1159258 Title: The IOSCHED default of deadline combined with 4k page size causes poor performance in lightly configured systems. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1159258/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs