improving ubuntu drive responsiveness?

[akos.maroy]

Hi,

I'm having a more and more terrible experience on Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit, in terms of desktop responsiveness. It seems that high disk activity will cause applications to freeze (turn dark for a while), and everything becomes unresponsive.

This is on a fairly decent system (i7, 12GB RAM), and WD 2TB SATA HDDs. to add to the mix, my home directory is encrypted by luks, but my root filesystem is not.

How would one improve on the desktop responsiveness which is seemingly hindered by disk drive i/o?


Akos

[Draxstyle]

I've been having the same!
And I also have a similar setup, i7, ATI etc.

I don't have an answer I'm afraid.
My personal solution was to install the 10.10 version instead which I'm very happy with. Everything works perfect. I have no need to upgrade at this moment!

/Drax

[Andrew_P]

Hi,

I'm having a more and more terrible experience on Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit, in terms of desktop responsiveness. It seems that high disk activity will cause applications to freeze (turn dark for a while), and everything becomes unresponsive.

Any specific applications? I've been seeing problems with the Mozilla SeaMonkey browser suite in this regard since release 1.18, but only on Ubuntu Linux; the Windows version of the program never thrashed my hard drive the way the Linux version did and continues to do at release 2.7. I've also seen the problem, to a lesser degree, with Firefox. The only way I've found to regain control of the system is to kill the browser with the System Monitor and restart it. Sometimes it gets so bad that the system becomes unresponsive to the keyboard and mouse, and I resort to pressing the reset button to force a reboot. (SeaMonkey shares much of the Firefox code base.)

The problem may be a badly written program, not the operating system.