It seems that I managed to reproduce with custom-built kernel, so I am starting
bisection.
It seems that the problem is I/O.
> Device tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_dscd/s kB_read kB_wrtn kB_dscd
> vda 436.66 167.78 3114.85 0.00 935805 17372932 0
> vda 270.82 822.20 9404.21 0.00 760877 8702840 0
The first is 5.6 = bad, the second is good = 5.5. 3 times slower writes, 5
times slower reads. But it could be due to accumulation of I/O buffers. Let's
see if I can bisect it at last as I failed 2 times already (bisection lead to a
merge commit or so...).