Interesting performance issues

[runfrodorun]

Hi!

I'm experiencing an interesting performance issue with icedove (thunderbird).

When I start up the program after a cold boot (nothing in cache) the gui will instantiate and then the computer will lock up for about a minute or two with the HD led solid on. During this time, my whole entire xfce desktop, icedove, and other running programs in X are not responsive whatsoever. If I switch to a tty and try to log in, the system can't launch bash because it's too busy waiting for something icedove is blocking. After about a minute or two the computer will come around and things will unfreeze. I decided to launch icedove with iotop open, and I see that icedove in fact does max out my estimated io bandwidth, and kworker thread also seems to use about 0.5% for the duration of the lockup.

Also interesting, I have spinning platters still, the drive light is solid on, but it is either reading a continuous file or something else very wrong is happening, as the heads do not move for the entire duration. I do not believe that my drive is failing, although I suppose I could be wrong, as everything checks out, SMART checks out, and the system appears to be working just fine. I have yet to run other tests but I'll let you know what I find. I contacted a friend and he said he had a similar problem and it had something to do with kworker thread.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, otherwise I'll post back when I've figured some things out.

-RJ