system grinds to a halt

[Michael Wardle]

Hi

I've had some unfortunate problems with my Breezy install that I wanted
to share.

A while ago, I performed a clean install of Hoary, and have been
dist-upgrading to the current Breezy packages every week or so.

I ran GNOME BitTorrent for the first time when Opera 8.5 was released
(about September 20).  I started downloading the Linux version, which
started OK, finished, and was providing uploads for other users, then
soon after started downloading the Windows version.  With two instances
of BitTorrent running simultaneously, my system became quickly
unresponsive, the load ever increasing up over 10.  Those who understand
system loads will know that anything over 1 on a single CPU system is
likely to make the system unusable.  Clearly, the system was I/O bound.

I've noticed similar problems when running LimeWire 4.9 with Sun JRE
1.5, and most recently it happened when browsing several pages on
Amazon.com in Epiphany.  I also typically have Evolution and Rhythmbox
running on my GNOME desktop.

About the only common themes here appear to be when I'm doing disk
access, which is pretty much all the time.

My home directory is on a separate NFS mount on a server on my 100 Mb/s
LAN.  I've never experienced problems such as this before.  The NFS
server is the Linux kernel-based server on a Linux 2.6 Debian Etch box.
There were no upgrades to the NFS server in the preceding few weeks.  I
had upgraded from 2.6.8 to 2.6.11 on the server in August (about a month
before the problems), but there's no evidence that this is the cause.  I
also can't see anything interesting in the server logs.

Has anybody else seen such problems?  Any tips on how to best debug and
track down this issue?

Thanks