Comment 346 for bug 131094

I have been running the 2.6.35 + iofix kernel for more than a week and unfortunately I am unable to see any difference. For example upon boot and logging into the desktop, my ubuntuone account will start doing it's syncing thing. I have about 20GB in the u1 folder and it takes about 5-10 minutes every boot to scan all the files and check for changes and sync etc. During that time the hard drive thrashes like crazy and when monitoring iotop the ubuntuone processes are reading and writing to the disk at about 400KB/s. During this process my PC is extremely slow and unresponsive. The default test is to boot up, start firefox and try a click a bookmark folder icon on my toolbar, which drops down a list of bookmarks. Firefox starts up ok, but it takes about 5 minutes for the drop down list to open once I click on it. No really 5 minutes.

Another default test is to boot up, let u1 do it's thing and quiet down, the open firefox. Then I start "stress -d 1" to stress out the disk and try and browse using firefox. I open Google Reader and try browse through my RSS feeds. While stress is running it practically impossible to to use or browse in firefox. Note stress is now reading and writing at 4-10MB/s. There seems no difference in responsiveness between the disk writing at 400KB/s or 4MB/s. And there seems no difference between the default kernel or this patched one.

Very sad :(

Are the guys who are seeing a difference doing anything else? Turning off swap? Changing the default scheduler? Why do some people see an improvement? Even though the improvements are still not good enough.