0

Every minute I get a second or so of minor lag. So far I know the following:

  • It happens every minute around :00 seconds
  • It only affects video, not audio
  • I get a spike of iowait and disk write every time it happens
  • Using iotop, the culprit appears to be nautilus
  • There are no jobs in /etc/cron.d/ set to go every minute
  • Nautilus does not have to have a window open for this to happen

I have a Dell Studio 1558 with an Intel i3 330M (Ironlake) and integrated Intel HD Graphics. I'm using whatever driver is included in Ubuntu by default, specifically i915 according to lspci -k.

I am not absolutely certain that that problem is nautilus, but I don't know where to go from here. Any answers or further debugging suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. Although my question seems to be a duplicate of this question, no answers were ever given in that thread, and the asker closed it because updating to 13.10 fixed the problem for him/her.

Community
  • 1
TheSchwa
  • 3,860

1 Answers1

0

I have variety installed, which is a wallpaper switcher. One of the options in the preferences was to have a large digital clock in the lower right corner of the desktop. Disabling this feature fixed my problem.

The iowait I was getting every minute must have been variety opening the wallpaper file and writing the new clock to it. The reason iowait showed the culprit to be nautilus is because nautilus manages the desktop and wallpaper in Ubuntu.

TheSchwa
  • 3,860