I am on SUSE 10.2, 2 IDE drives, ext3 formatting.

Recently when I download files, whether videos, pictures, or streams, I am seeing alot of start and stop. When I check top, what's happening is that kjournald is popping to the top, and consuming inordinate resources. This happens when I am in Firefox, and downloading a picture or video. It interferes so much that the cursor jumps and the system momentarily freezes.

This hasnt happened in the past, and I haven't upgraded or installed any new software recently. Any kinds of hints what this may be? Why would this begin happening? Have I reached some threshhold of disk usage and it is doing more processing??

Thanks,
Kork