Comment 29 for bug 1152736

This bug affects my laptop as well, regardless of swap or swappiness settings.

The laptop is an Asus UX32A, and has only ever had 13.04 installed (from the RC prior to release)

/swap is configured with 4G of space on the internal SSD rather than the HDD.

Under normal usage kswapd0 starts using 99%+ of CPU every couple of hours. `killall` on firefox or thunderbird usually fixes things (I generally have a lot of Firefox windows open), as does switching to another TTY and waiting, watching `top` and the HDD light as kswapd0 thrashes the disk.

While kswapd0 is using CPU, the UI starts to become unresponsive, with interactions delayed and the mouse movemenets becoming jerky.

I've configured this machine with and without swap, with high and low swappiness (it's currently 20, but I originally set it to 0) and nothing affects kswapd0 using up to 100% CPU and making the entire machine unresponsive.

In some instances it has become so bad and the disk thrashing so consistent and long-term that only a hard power-off works to recover control of the machine (pressing ctrl-alt-F2 for example will take in excess of 5 minutes to respond, and the password entry in that TTY will timeout before completing login, as will attempts to connect via SSH)

An example `free -h`
                 total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.8G 3.6G 157M 0B 4.3M 1.1G
-/+ buffers/cache: 2.5G 1.3G
Swap: 3.9G 719M 3.2G

I've previously used another laptop also with 4Gb of RAM, configured the same way (except with /swap on a spinning disk rather than an SSD) and I used that laptop with variations from 10.04 up to 12.10 with no swap issues at all.

My desktop (Mint14), also with 4Gb of RAM does not suffer this swapping problem either.

General information:
3.8.0-19-generic #29-Ubuntu SM
desktop: Mate 1.6.0