Journaling is killing response time

[Nils Kassube]

Bruce Marshall wrote:
> 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'm curious: How do you know it is journaling I/O? I mean, I have also 
seen similar response problems but here it happens for several months 
now and I'd really like to know the cause. I'm using 14.04 BTW.


Nils