Ah, I had it pegged for doing PIO. The CPU seems to slam to 100% every time it starts paging and generally ignores anything else going on in the system including user interaction. I suppose if it's ticking on a task it can't help but get stuck, but certainly that shouldn't force it to get stuck in one context and fail to service other, non-paged, processes?

I suppose it compounds that the swap algorithm is very poorly suited for such a small amount of RAM (that and swappiness is at 100, so even in-use things get pushed out.) Almost makes me wonder how we functioned not 10 years ago...