[Users] [Bug 2584] GUI redraws itself slowly - solved for me

[Michael]

Hmm, perhaps not exactly file system access, but how about 'sync' and/or the PCI bus got overloaded ? 

If you look at  http://lists.claws-mail.org/pipermail/users/2012-January/001184.html you can see, both GPU and SATA / DMA controllers are on PCI Express bus 00. The main system memory should be on PCIE too.
I'm not at all into mainboard architecture, but when you take into account there are several harddisks and separate partitions for /, /home, and /var (besides some more for different type of user-data) then how about GTK asking for GPU memory was blocked by pending filesystem journal commits (or whatever) which accumulated by no-barriers and data=writeback mode ? And maybe a 'sync' is done when the application gets closed ?
Just one weird idea, lacking any clue.