LUKS Encryption system slowdown/broken Places menu

[Unlimited]

My primary F9 partition is encrypted. It worked out really well for the first month or so and then something unusual started happened. Every so often my system would seize up and my hard-drive activity light would be slammed. I just have to wait until it stops, and in the meantime Firefox greys out and Gnome doesn't respond either. Upon further investigation using 'top' I discovered the culprit to be a process named "kcryptd" switching to "D" status and "wa" registering at over 95%. So obviously this process is hogging my hard-drive IO and has something to do with encryption, but it seems to be doing this more and more frequently. What exactly is going on, and is there anyway to stop it?

My second problem is simpler but equally strange. For some reason when I try to navigate to my Home/Documents/Music/etc folders via the top Places menu in Gnome it is launching VLC instead of Nautilus. How can I change it back?

[moosetooth]

I'm having a similar problem. I've been using LUKS to encrypt my home, well, since it was first introduced in Fedora. Since the upgrade to F9 I've had frequent severe lags with kcryptd appearing to be in the IO wait. I've never encountered this with past Fedora releases (at least not noticeably so).

I'm not sure if there is some process that is much more disk intensive running, I haven't had time to investigate.

So in other words I'm simply adding a "Me too" to your thread.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

[A.Serbinski]

This sounds like the famous firefox3 problem. It happens to everybody, particularly those with large volumes of disk I/O. The problem is that it needlessly fsyncs with great frequency, causing ALL buffered data to be synchronized to the disk. Those with encrypted partitions will be more severely hit due to the encryption overhead, which you're seeing as kcryptd. Search the forum and you'll find a number of threads regarding this.

[sej7278]

is there any fix for this firefox3 issue, i'm about to upgrade from fedora7 in a few days and want at least /home to be encrypted, if i can't get performance whilst running firefox then i won't be upgrading.

edit: seems its been semi-fixed in the firefox3 release, not totally fixed until 3.0.1 or 3.1 or some later version.

[vpp]

Hello,
last week I noticed this strange Places menu behaviour too. For me, all those three first choices (Home, Desktop, Bookmarks) launch MPLayer?! I am using Fedora Core 8 on AMD64. I can't find any way to modify Places menu although Applications and System menus can be modified?! Uninstalling and reinstalling did not make any difference...

I managed to change the normal association when clicking on a directory name, but this menu is still broken for those three entries. Any help?

-vp-