System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Konstantin Svist]

  On 09/14/2010 02:21 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Konstantin Svist<fry.kun at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>   For some reason, while running HDD-intensive tasks (e.g. svn update on
>> a large tree), system becomes extremely unresponsive.
>> And I don't mean tasks that require any disk access - I'm trying to type
>> inside an ssh session in a terminal, and the remote machine is getting
>> my keystrokes after a pretty long delay.
>>
>> Just now, composing this email, thunderbird got stuck at the previous
>> sentence for a second while it was downloading new messages.
>>
>> What's going on??
> Supposedly there are kernel scheduler fixes in to fix that problem.
>
> For now, try to reduce your swapping. Are you using RAID?
>

No, I'm on a laptop with 1 drive and I'm not using swap at all (because 
all my programs fit just fine in the 2GB of physical RAM)