[Bug 31766] Re: Dapper: Total starvation of GUI apps during heavy disk usage

[John Dong]

Go into /boot/grub/menu.lst, look for the line beginning with "# kopt=",
add "elevator=cfq" at the very end of the line.

Then, run "sudo update-grub" and reboot.


For reiserfs users, note that reiserfs is pretty notorious for starving the system while performing heavy metadata operations (i.e. creating/moving/deleting files), which may be what you're seeing. CFQ alleviates the problem slightly, but the behavior is a reiserfs design flaw. Sure it may be tons faster at performing these operations, but while they're in progress don't expect many other disk accesses to go through :)

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Dapper:  Total starvation of GUI apps during heavy disk usage
https://launchpad.net/bugs/31766