This happened while an mdadm array was syncing, all access from writing a new blank file to opening a small .txt file was very slow:
[222117.312078] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[222117.685060] EXT3-fs (md0): using internal journal
[222117.685096] EXT3-fs (md0): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode
[222122.376847] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[222122.602825] EXT3-fs (md2): using internal jour........
I thought only a faster CPUand SSDwould help but I already have a Quad-Core CPU and it wasn't being maxed out. The actual tests were performed on an AMD-V enabled 128MB dual core VMWare container though.
There is a flag that can be passed to make in order to start multiple threads, by specifying 4 threads I was able to reduce the whole kernel compilation time from scratch by about 50%! (65minutes vs 31minutes!). *Yes I did do a make clean before each co........