System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 14:36:12 -0400,
>  Robert Myers <rbmyersusa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've never thought that there was anything more complicated to this
>> phenomenon than that keyboard and disk i/o are both serviced by
>> interrupts.
>
> That's not likely the problem. It's probably competing access to disk I/O
> between the process displaying the desktop and other processes using disk I/O.
>

It's a niggle, but, by "keyboard i/o," I intended to refer to the
entire sequence of steps that is necessary to make it appear to the
user that a keystroke has been dealt with more or less
instantaneously.   As I understand the matter, that would be a fairly
long cascade of interrupts, some of which might, indeed, have to wait
for access to disk.

Robert.