Comment 77 for bug 131094

I have made some tests on different notebooks. I have made a dist upgrade of the 32-Bit Version of feisty and a fresh install of the 32-Bit and 64-Bit version of Gusty. The disc performance is bad. It occurs, when an program accesses the hard drive heavily. It's not a tracker problem. The resume process of an 512MB RAM of the virtual machine (VMWare Workstation 6) last about 5 minutes, on Feisty about 1 minute. Sometimes the mouse freezes for two seconds on heavy disc access.

The problem occurs on my sata and pata machine.

ThinkPad R50p - Pentium M (1,7GHz) - 2GB – PATA
ThinkPad T61p – Core2 Duo 7700 (2,4GHz) – 4 GB – SATA

On my old machine Gusty is unusable, that's why I reinstalled Feisty. There are no problems under Feisty yet. Gusty on the new machine is like using Vista. Gnome needs a lot of time to start and I am missing the fast response I know from Feisty. On Gusty I starts Firefox and it takes about 8 second before the firefox window pops up. My old Pentium M seems to be faster (faster response) than my new machine with Gusty.

I think it's not an DMA problem, because I get good results with hdparm -tT /dev/hda.

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads: 8604 MB in 1.99 seconds = 4315.53 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 136 MB in 3.01 seconds = 45.17 MB/sec

And I get good read and write results on the hard disc at 800MHz (lowest frequency), when there is no other disc access.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 Bytes (1,0 GB) kopiert, 18,7464 Sekunden, 55,9 MB/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 Bytes (1,0 GB) kopiert, 17,0126 Sekunden, 61,6 MB/s

The sync command last about one second.
I am using ext3 as file system and I don't think it's an ext3 problem, because there aren't any problems without concurrent access.

Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags: signed directory hash

I am using now the newest kernel, but same problems on all other kernels.
2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Dec 18 05:28:27 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux