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

[Timothy Miller]

>
> 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 :)
>

As I recall, I was seeing almost zero CPU usage while this was going
on.  As I say, I was using tar, so it was very I/O intensive.  Very
little of that metadata stuff was going on.

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