Comment 272 for bug 131094

Please could the severity/importance of this bug be raised. I would consider a bug which has been prevalent for almost 3 years, which caused extreme slowdown of the entire desktop when there is any kind of high disk activity, to be pretty serious. This drastically affect my usage and productivity of the desktop on a daily basis. Up until this time I have always thought it's just how linux is and the benefit of all the other great features outweighs a bit of slow down. Well it seems to be getting worse and as I start to use even more of the potential of my PC's I am getting a little tired of it. Recently been testing ubuntuone extensively and I suspect a big portion of my extremely slow index and read issues, of the thousands of files I have in my ubuntuone folder, is actually caused by this bug. Although there are still some improvements which could be made in that process which the ubuntuone team are actively working on and doing some great work. There at least someone is working on big issues but sadly it seems only due to the commercial potential of ubuntuone.

This seems to be a kernel issue as per this bug report: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309
But the status of that bug is confusing as it's marked as closed due to insufficient information.

Does anyone know who is working this? I have attempted to contact the person assigned as well as Ben Gamari, who I see is subscribed to this bug on launchpad as well, for some clarification. I will patiently wait their response. What testing needs to be done and what can be done from a non-developers perspective to fix this.

IMO this is the worst bug in linux right now and I think a bit more attention must be brought to it, more than just a slashdot article: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/049201

I would not recommend Ubuntu or Linux to any new users until this bug is fixed. It is embarrassing when trying to praise all the benefits of using linux to a Windows user when their entire desktop locks up when trying to do simple things like run a backup or unrar a file.

In the past I have attributed slowness issues in several other applications as application specific problems. There have been bugs logged for:

Unison, Firefox, downthemall FF plugin, unrar, ubuntuone, flash, gnome, VMWare, Virtualbox, qemu and kvm etc etc.

I think all of these issues could be attributed to this one problem. There are too many apps that experience slowness and grey outs for it not to be related. this happens between disks or on the same disk, between disk type like usb, ide or sata. So we must not confuse the problem. If there is any kind of disk IO the machine freezes. As the bug above says: Large I/O operations result in slow performance and high iowait times. That is the problem as far I can tell.

I offer any help required to fix this bug. Just let me know what i need to do. But please lets raise the importance. This is a critical issue, not medium.

Thanks guys, keep up the great work, linux still rocks :)