Unusually enough, the issue seems to have resolved itself on my end. I haven't experienced any hangups for the past few days; checking on the system periodically, CPU load averages are reasonable for the activity (< 0.50, vs. > 4.0 from before).
The only relevant changes I've made since is disabling KDE's nepomuk/Strigi indexing entirely, and installing the almost daily updates of ALSA kernel modules from the ubuntu-audio-dev PPA, not to mention keeping up-to-date from all official repos. This leads me to believe that the source is either the audio or file I/O subsystems.
Unusually enough, the issue seems to have resolved itself on my end. I haven't experienced any hangups for the past few days; checking on the system periodically, CPU load averages are reasonable for the activity (< 0.50, vs. > 4.0 from before).
The only relevant changes I've made since is disabling KDE's nepomuk/Strigi indexing entirely, and installing the almost daily updates of ALSA kernel modules from the ubuntu-audio-dev PPA, not to mention keeping up-to-date from all official repos. This leads me to believe that the source is either the audio or file I/O subsystems.
Any progress for the others affected?