Hi all, I am running jaunty. Sometimes, randomly, the disk starts spinning (I hear the noise and see the light) and the system becomes unusable. Often, to gain control of a shell (even in console) is a matter of waiting minutes and eventually, when I finally can do some "top" "iotop" or "ps" to understand what's happening, the storms is already calmed and I can't see anything. I am not running trackerd on this machine (and with last year of development, it's rarely the culprit).
This time I did that in time, while thinking "be it the kernel itself, I apt-get remove it". I found that cron jobs where running. I am seriously tempted to apt-get remove anacron :) But it seems to me that the apt automatic update is the problem. I will try disabling it. At the end of the storm, I can see this: vince...@frattaglia:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1017884 987568 30316 0 16544 651836 -/+ buffers/cache: 319188 698696 Swap: 1887596 1884040 3556 So yes, an hurricane has passed in my poor 1gb of memory, leaving almost 2gb of trash in my swap partition. This problem makes ubuntu reach the bottom of its user experience. From an end-user point of view, you are working, and your system trashes. It takes several seconds to even get the focus to an existing terminal if any. There's nothing else to say, this must not happen. Cron jobs should not be able to take over a system. How could this be solved? Would a smart use of the "nice" command be enough? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss