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

[Timothy Miller]

Public bug reported:

I'm using a fast P4 system, a fast disk, and DMA seems to be enabled for
the disk.

Whenever I have something doing heavy disk access, such as (un)taring a
file (not even compressing so little CPU usage), KDE apps that need to
access the disk AT ALL, like Konqueror, will freeze for minutes at a
time.

Note that in my case, I'm extracting a 4 gigabyte tar, and it contains
some large files.  But as I understand it, the anticipatory scheduler is
supposed to help interleave access to the disk in a way that alleviates
this kind of starvation and maximizes total throughput.  Which I/O
scheduler are you using?

Anyhow, this kind of starvation needs to be investigated, because it's a
major usability problem.

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Major
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Confirmed

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