Comment 170 for bug 330824

This problem definitely IS NOT LIMITED to deletion, as most comments seem to indicate.

First I only had it sometimes when emptying my trash (with a few roughly 1GB files), but after a reboot the trash was empty, so it seems that the freeze occurred after syncing the disk / completing the operation.

I've also had the freeze yesterday during a svn checkout of chromium (a few GB of data, but rather slowly, so the system had looots of time to sync everything in small chunks, you'd think).

After deleting and re-checkout (which worked the second time), I created a tar-ball (also about 1GB) of the source tree. That froze the system, too (and wasn't doing much at all in-between excepting surfing the web).

Today I wanted to delete the huge source+binary tree, which resulted in having to reboot five times, until finally an "rm -rf" succeeded without freezing the system. I've found that running a kind of sync-daemon (sleep 5-10 secs, sync) loop in the background might help (I've now created another 1GB tarball and been doing other things, without a freeze).

Not sure if this problem has to do with the system trying to flush lots of data at a time (but then I'm not sure why the svn checkout or the tarballing also froze the system, it wasn't THAT much data per second).

Everything on an up-to-date jaunty system.