On Tue, 2011-06-07 at 04:28 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:

Every few minutes, (I guess) when applications do fsync (firefox,
xchat, vim, etc), all applications that use fsync() hang for several
seconds, and applications that use general IO suffer extreme
slowdowns. iotop shows various combinations of the processes listed
below doing writes, and the total write as 2-3MB/s. 

I have experienced this too. It /seemed/ to help removing a lot of
snapshots (i have hundreds that i didn't really need).

Would it be stupid to try disabling fsync like described at 
 http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1103926.html ?

I don't know of the consequences... but it would prove your theory?

~mck

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