This issue is occuring locally on my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad W541) which is connected to an external HDD with 2T that stores the bitcoin blockchain and eletrumx data.
My laptop specs:
Ubuntu 18.04.4
16 GB RAM/ Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz/ ~100 GB partition SSD (using a HDD with 2T to store the blockchain/electrumx data)
I have some open apps running in the background like chrome, telegram, keybase, pycharm, IntelliJ ... I don't see any specific app consuming a lot of resources.
Here is the output of iostat when the problem occurred:
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
32.1% 0.0% 9.0% 7.2% 0.0% 51.7%
Device tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
loop0
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 6.3M 0.0k
loop1
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 3.7M 0.0k
loop2
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 111.0k 0.0k
loop3
0.01 0.0k 0.0k 10.8M 0.0k
loop4
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 118.0k 0.0k
loop5
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 5.6M 0.0k
loop6
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 813.0k 0.0k
loop7
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 44.0k 0.0k
sda
17.17 151.9k 162.7k 163.9G 175.6G
loop8
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 5.6M 0.0k
loop9
0.01 0.0k 0.0k 6.5M 0.0k
loop10
0.53 0.5k 0.0k 588.2M 0.0k
loop11
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 6.4M 0.0k
loop12
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 78.0k 0.0k
loop13
0.01 0.0k 0.0k 6.6M 0.0k
loop14
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 3.3M 0.0k
loop15
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 192.0k 0.0k
loop16
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 758.0k 0.0k
loop17
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 2.5M 0.0k
loop18
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 3.5M 0.0k
loop19
0.01 0.0k 0.0k 8.0M 0.0k
loop20
0.17 0.2k 0.0k 183.5M 0.0k
loop21
0.15 0.2k 0.0k 169.5M 0.0k
loop22
0.21 0.2k 0.0k 231.2M 0.0k
loop23
0.07 0.1k 0.0k 80.3M 0.0k
loop24
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 6.0M 0.0k
loop25
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 5.7M 0.0k
loop26
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 5.6M 0.0k
loop27
0.01 0.0k 0.0k 6.7M 0.0k
loop28
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 493.0k 0.0k
loop29
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 46.0k 0.0k
sdb
34.03 1.3M 504.2k 1.5T 544.1G
loop30
0.05 0.1k 0.0k 61.0M 0.0k
loop31
0.00 0.0k 0.0k 8.0k 0.0k