I have a few dodgy cheap SSDs, so I’m not surprised by slow I/O performance in general. But my Plasma desktop frequently freezes for 1-3 seconds (including the cursor!) whenever there is high IO load, for example while installing a Steam game.
Updating the screen should be completely independent from I/O, shouldn’t it? Is there anything I could’ve misconfigured in my Arch Linux? I’m running Plasma 6.1.4 in Wayland.
I had something similar when my drive started to fail.
At first, it was annoying, because the cursor froze all the time, just like yours, then programs started to do the same, then they started to crash without reason, and in the end, even my unbreakable OS (Fedora Atomic) broke randomy and incoherently.
What did I learn? Don’t cheap out on drives, and keep enough backups.
Yeah, I’d be checking the smart stats on my drives and doing a full data backup if I didn’t already have one.
The SMART didn’t help. It showed full health and no errors.
While that’s encouraging, I would still make a full backup of my data and have a plan to replace the drive while I investigated further.