I may have found the source of the touted Ubuntu 8.10 sluggishness with heavy HDD I/O operations ("system slows down to a crawl!" "System stops responding for as long as 1 minute when copying/moving data", etc, etc). Earlier this morning I did a backup of a Windows drive to one of my drives, it wasn't too much, in total about 50 Gigs (copied to my drive, then moved back to another NTFS drive), however when the system was performing the copy, I did see the CPU usage spike quite a bit and the CPU frequency go to top. Though I didn't have any kind of sluggishness or slow down in the desktop, some applications did have a harder time doing some tasks (for example, Firefox took quite a bit longer to render an animated .gif (granted, a fairly large one [5Mb] ), and the speed (usually FF is quite fast at rendering .gifs) was not what I'd expected. So I opened a terminal window and saw in Top that the ntfs-3g process was using about 20-30% CPU (this time I was writing data back to an NTFS drive). Maybe ntfs-3g hammers so hard the kernel for I/O that eventually also affects desktop performance (after all UI operations are also I/O).
At any rate, maybe this would be worth reporting to the ntfs-3g guys or to Ubuntu in particular, maybe is fixable either in fuse or ntfs-3g itself.
By the way I'm using ntfs-3g-1.5012-3 on my Fedora 8 x86_64 box and the reported version is ntfs-3g v2007-08-22-BETA.
At any rate, maybe this would be worth reporting to the ntfs-3g guys or to Ubuntu in particular, maybe is fixable either in fuse or ntfs-3g itself.
By the way I'm using ntfs-3g-1.5012-3 on my Fedora 8 x86_64 box and the reported version is ntfs-3g v2007-08-22-BETA.
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