Comment 126 for bug 131094

I find that the desktop is much more responsive under heavy disk I/O with either 2.6.24-18-generic or 2.6.24-19-generic (64 bit and 32 bit) when you compare it to 2.6.24-17-generic and earlier. Both deadline and cfq scheduling work fine.

My test was to start my 2.8GB test file copy from one sda partition to another and then try opening lots of webpages in different tabs in FF3RC1, opening lots of new nautilus windows from the gnome 'Places' menu, and starting up a number of new apps. The desktop runs slower than if you aren't copying a large file, and once an open Thunderbird window greyed out briefly, but the desktop is definitely usable now, and it wasn't in the original Hardy release.

I do notice the following though: if you start the copy and leave everything alone for a few seconds (eg around 400MB, when the file operations window tells you its throughput) and then try to switch between windows, sometimes there's a delay in the desktop responding. It's just not as long as it used to be, and it only seems to happen once for me.