Comment 27 for bug 131094

I can confirm this problem on latest Gutsy. It bothered me a while, but shamefully I didn't yet took the time to report it and I forgot wether this first appeared in feisty or in gutsy. My system was upgraded at least since feisty, possibly also since dapper. I actually can't remember when I last installed ubuntu from scratch.

Attached are the outputs of dmesg, hdparm -tT, smartctl -a, lspci -vvn and a vmstat 2 during my latest dist-upgrade that made the system heavily unresponsive (again). Also, while tracker is indexing, or evolution is starting or any other normal disk-io is happening, the system becomes unusable. Dist-upgrades of only a few packages take ages.

If there's anything I can do to help identify the root cause, please ask.