I'm having issues on my installation of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that have only started happening very recently. Basically, it seems that anytime I perform any add, modify, move, copy, or delete a file on my file system and when opening images in the default image viewer, after a few moments of completing the task, the entire UI freezes except for the mouse cursor, which is restricted to staying on the single screen that it was on when the UI froze (I.E. I can't move the mouse to the other of my dual monitors). The freeze lasts for a short while...maybe 30 seconds to a minute (I'm not quite sure exactly how long it is though), after which the UI continues to function and anything that tried to do with the mouse (other than move it to the second monitor) while the UI was frozen executes as it should in the correct order as well. I've also noticed that my load average is hardly a 2 when the freeze begins, but is around 18 or so after the freeze ends (I have an i7 with 4 hyperthreaded cores). I assume that the load average of 18 is probably because it has tons of queued processes ready to execute that were put off during the freeze. However, when I edit/move/copy/create/delete files in an editor like Sublime Text or Android Studio no freeze occurs whatsoever. The freeze occurs regardless of whether or not I perform the action(s) in the terminal or in nautilus. I've searched and searched and I can't find an answer to why this is happening. Perhaps I don't know the right thing to search for, but I hope that someone here can help.
My setup:
- Ubuntu Version: 14.04 LTS (latest updates installed)
- Partition Containing OS: sda5 (Format: ext4)
- RAM: 12 GB DDR3 (3-Channel)
- I've verified that swap is indeed working. However, it seems that it is never used. Not sure though.
- My home directory is actually a symbolic link to the root of another 1 TB HDD found at
/mnt/Data
(sdb1 - ext4 format)
My HDDs/Partitions (All are MBR partitioned and use SATA connections):
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT FORMAT
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1K 0 part Extended
├─sda2 8:2 0 232.9G 0 part HFS+
├─sda5 8:5 0 221.2G 0 part / Ext4
└─sda6 8:6 0 11.7G 0 part [SWAP] Swap
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 931.5G 0 part /mnt/Data Ext4
sdc 8:32 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sdc1 8:33 0 931.5G 0 part /mnt/Backup Ext4