I think this is a very important area of improvements for linux. While we call it "multitasking" there are a lot of situations where one might doubt it deserves

I think this is a very important area of improvements for linux. While we call it "multitasking" there are a lot of situations where one might doubt it deserves that title. I have been experimenting with very low cost computing setups that optimize for robustness and that led me to pretty slow disk I/O. While thats not a typical scenario for desktop computing, it can and should be possible with the limited but sane resources I ended up with. In practice however, certain loads freeze the whole system until a single usually non-urgent write finishes. Basically the whole throuput is used for a big write and then X (and others) freeze because they are waiting for the filesystem (probably just a stat and similar). There are differences between applications. Some "behave" worse than others. Some even manage to choke themselves (ever seen GIMP take over an hour to write 4MB to an NFS RAID with 128kb/s throughput?). I guess this is a hard problem, but I would wish for an OS to never stall on load. It is even better to slow down exponentially than to halt other tasks. Ideally the sytem would be smart and deprioritize long-running tasks so that small, presumably urgent, tasks are impacted as little as possible.