slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 18:01 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On my IBM X31 laptop, the system entirely locks up when there's a lot of
> disk access, some common situations are:
>  - when getting heavily into swap due to a runaway process
>  - when running rpm/yum
> 
> It's not *technically* locked up (i.e. if you wait long enough it will
> come back) but in practice you have to reboot if a process has a memory
> leak, and you can't do any work while running yum.

This is actually an already reported bug (although the reported one was
concerned with what openoffice would do to a system when it forced
swap):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=142809