hanging in fsync for 3+ seconds

[George Nychis <gnychis@cmu.edu>]

Hi all,

I noticed that all of a sudden my disk writes using VIM/EMACS are taking 
3+ seconds for even just a single byte.  So, I've used strace to narrow 
it down to fsync.

The following log is an fsync opening up a new file 'test' inserting a 
't' and writing and quitting in vim:
   http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gnychis/slog

If you do a search for the only fsync, you will see it takes more than 3 
seconds:
   15171      0.000094 fsync(6)            = 0 <3.386504>

What can I do to determine why the fsync is taking so long?  I am not 
getting any disk error messages in system logs.

Info about my system:
   Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon desktop machine, updated as of last night
   Linux 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP i686 GNU/Linux, running reiserFS.

Thanks!
George