We had a look at it a while ago and I remember you saying something about dirty pages and cache misses but my memory is a bit foggy… It takes some time for the system to become fully responsive again after aborting mrtransform on my machine.
my machine:
mount
/dev/mapper/systemvg-rootlv on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,discard,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (rw)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /run/user type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755)
none on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw)
/dev/mapper/home-crypt on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
rpc_pipefs on /run/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
systemd on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,none,name=systemd)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/9074/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=mp14)
perinatal-nas01:/perinatal-projectdata on /projects/perinatal type nfs4 (rw,proto=tcp,port=2049,sloppy,addr=159.92.151.44,clientaddr=159.92.151.97)
/dev/mapper/luks-5c673ed4-ba64-40a6-94e3-74240c294f75 on /media/mp14/ext type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2)cat /proc/vmstat | egrep "dirty|writeback" ## during mrconvert
nr_dirty 184362
nr_writeback 327420
nr_writeback_temp 0
nr_dirty_threshold 653073
nr_dirty_background_threshold 326536
cat /proc/vmstat | egrep "dirty|writeback" ### a minute after aborting
nr_dirty 52
nr_writeback 0
nr_writeback_temp 0
nr_dirty_threshold 681880
nr_dirty_background_threshold 340940
The machine where it works is beastie01.