Comment 203 for bug 131094

KhaaL: thanks for pointing to that thread, but there is so much information there that I cannot really separate all the issues at hand. The test suite does not give any satisfactory results which I could interpret. For now my best test is just to copy big files from PATA to SATA disk, however the XFS allocation strategy may scatter the files (or parts of every file) on the disk which makes I/O performance a bit different every time.

I've tried that using the Intrepid default kernel and the Jaunty default kernel. It seems that the Jaunty kernel is a lot more sluggish. From the PPA I downloaded 2.6.29 which seems to be no good either. Some people have mentioned slow fsync behviour in 2.6.29 just as in 2.6.28 which is the Jaunty default.

Currently I am running 2.6.30 from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.30-rc2/linux-image-2.6.30-020630rc2-generic_2.6.30-020630rc2_amd64.deb in which I don't really notice slow GUI behaviour. While copying the large files I can still open a terminal and do stuff. I will reboot and try this again running with a 'mem=512m' boot option to make sure there is not too much caching going.