Comment 388 for bug 131094

Well, yes, many-many years ago on much more powerless machines, I could play MP3 and we had some kind of compo with friends to be able to interrupt the music by doing I/O. It was quite hard. Then as far as I can tell the situation became more and more worse, which is especially odd that I started to use more and more powerfull machines meanwhile. Now, I can say that almost anything I do which generates some I/O stops the whole desktop, gnome-terminal windows are white (not updated) for long seconds (sometimes even a minute!) sometimes even the mouse can't be moved. And no, it can't be a hw problem as I noticed it on many different machines with totally different hardware (SCSI, "normal" ide/pata, sata .... both of 32 and 64 bit kernels/systems, AMD/intel CPU, etc) and very different kernels and even distributions (well, ubuntu and debian to be precise) during the years. However that's true that the worst came in the last 1-2 years, as far as I can remember, though I could notice getting things worse even before that.