Comment # 79 on bug 1063638 from Ludwig Nussel

(In reply to Frederic Crozat from comment #78)
> (In reply to Ludwig Nussel from comment #76)
> > The background timer does not know if the time is a convenient one for the
> > user.
> > How about for example running those btrfs tasks directly after installing
> > updates, as part of what the desktop applet shows? That's something desktop
> > users are expected to do regularly anyways and installing updates also
> > degrades system performance.
> 
> I'm not so sure it would work:
> 
> right now, the quota bug (which is the most visible bug) is happening in
> btrfs transaction. This means it causes ANY IO write to the same btrfs
> partition to be blocked. If you happen to have /home in that, it will cause
> freeze of most applications trying to write on the system (in my case,
> gnome-shell, or evolution or irc client). Having a notification that balance
> is in effect will not be helpful at all for that case, because either you
> will not see it or even if you see it, the system will still be in a
> "frozen" state, with no possible action on it

That's why balancing should ideally only be done on ACK by the user. Just
showing a notification when the timer triggers would be an improvement over the
current solution but not fully satisfactory as the user still can't do anything
about it. To avoid more and more things bothering the user we could attach the
balance job to installing updates as the user resp admin already has to trigger
that manually.