[14.04] High/disruptive disk usage after dist-upgrade today

[Bernard Gray]

Hi All,

I'm having issues immediately after today's dist-upgrade with high
disk usage whenever I attempt to do... well, pretty much any
operation. My machine is a current gen Core i7, 16GB RAM (5GB used),
16GB swap (0 used), and the disk is a 7200rpm spindle drive.

An example of the issue, is an apt-get remove operation - the removal
of a small package (ntop), takes upwards of 1 minute to read the dpkg
database and actually complete the operation. Normally I would expect
this to be a 5s operation at most.

Even typing this email, I'm getting the occasional pause, which
coincides with the disk activity light on my desktop and my keyboard
cursor hangs for 5-10s until is subsides.

I've been running on the 14.04 repo for several months now. I
dist-upgrade approximately daily, I do it in the safest environment I
can create (I am also a long term debian sid user)
 * log out of KDE,
 * stop KDM,
 * init 3 just to be sure
 * dist-upgrade in the tty

Obviously this is a pretty critical time in the release schedule for
14.04 so I thought I'd better let someone know.

Please let me know if there's any further troubleshooting you
need/want me to perform -

Regards,
Bernard Gray