I changed the scheduler to from 'cfq' to 'deadline' and I increased to commit times. That seems to have solved the problem for me as today the system did not slow down to almost freeze anymore with the same load.
To me it somehow still is a bug as I think an OS is not supposed to slow down that much, no matter what, without clear indication what is going on and without means to analyze or stop or reboot or whatever. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to e2fsprogs in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1764180 Title: System slows down to almost freeze Status in e2fsprogs package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: For quite a while sometimes my system slows down to almost freeze where it becomes unusable. The problem seems to be related to heavy disk i/o, but I have not been able to pinpoint the cause. The problem seems to occur when I both use the bitcoin core application for Bitcoin Gold and VirtualBox. I normally use VirtualBox to run two Windows 2008 servers. It seems in the end the system sorts itself out and starts running normal again, but it often causes to destroy the status of the Virtual Machines, sometimes resulting in a Virtual Machine going into 'guru- meditation' mode. Normally my system is fast enough to run everything. I have 8 Gb memory, 5 hard disks and an Intel I5. I tried to spread the load over the hard disks, but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the slowing down of the system. My feeling is that the problem is somehow related to some disk i/o system independent of the individual disks. Mostly the problem is solved by stopping the Bitcoin Core Gold program, but that is very hard to do, as even a terminal window takes minutes or up to an hour or so to respond. That also makes it very hard to identify the problem. I have several monitoring programs installed, but can't use them when the system is in this 'almost frozen' mode. I am using Ubuntu 16.04.4. The problem is not to x.x.4 version of Ubuntu 16.04. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04 Package: e2fslibs 1.42.13-1ubuntu1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-38.43~16.04.1-generic 4.13.16 Uname: Linux 4.13.0-38-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.15 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: LXDE Date: Mon Apr 16 04:45:11 2018 Dependencies: gcc-7-base 7.1.0-10ubuntu1~16.04.york0 [origin: LP-PPA-jonathonf-gcc-7.1] libc6 2.23-0ubuntu10 libgcc1 1:7.1.0-10ubuntu1~16.04.york0 [origin: LP-PPA-jonathonf-gcc-7.1] InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-01-21 (449 days ago) InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" - Release amd64 (20151021) SourcePackage: e2fsprogs UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/1764180/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
