Journaling is killing response time

[Bruce Marshall]

Lately I've been having really bad response intermittently, but often 
enough it is really irritating.  For example, I will try to kill a 
program like T-bird, and it will take so long that I get the "not 
responding" message. But the problem is that it CAN'T respond due to 
being blocked by the journaling I/O.  If I tell it to wait, it will 
finally close.

I've been googling the problem and have changed a lot of mount parms but 
nothing seems to help.  Running  14.10 on an AMD64 machine and this 
problem seems to have cropped up from the latest batch of updates, 
within the last one or two weeks.

Another strange thing is that after applying the recent updates 
(including the 3.16.0-31 kernel,  update-grub refuses to consider 
3.16.0-31 as the kernel to boot and doesn't include it in grub.cfg. But 
if I make the manual change to that kernel, nothing improves.

Anyone else experiencing response problems lately?

-- "Remember, the fact that you're paranoid" "doesn't mean they're NOT 
out to get you!"