Take the tour ×  I never quite understood why high disk I/O
slowed the system so much. It's strange to me because I would
expect the slow-down to affect only those processes dependent on
the hard/optical drive data, but the slow-down affects even
stuff loaded onto RAM. I'm here referring to iowait.  Why does
the processor wait, instead of doing other work? Can anyone
explain this limitation and why it hasn't been solved in Linux
kernel? Is there a kernel out there that doesn't have this
problem?  [note] There has been some progress in this
performance area. For one, the later kernels (2.6.37 in my case)
are much more responsive.  share|improve this question Didn't
xeno explain exactly how this has been solved in the Linux
kernel the last time you asked? –  Michael Mrozek Jan 10 '11 at
17:21 Given the edits, I think the intent is to have the
previous question be about the progress being made towards
fixing the problem while this question is about why the problem
exists. –  Steven D Jan 10 '11 at 17:58 @mic Ste