Comment 4 for bug 493852

The problem won't go away if you ionice it. It'll just run with ionice priority, but it'll still being doing an ostensibly completely redundant stat() of files on the filesystem, instead of just reading from `dpkg -l`.

So even if that could alleviate the case where it's racing other system processes for I/O, it won't solve the case of your disk being spun up for a long time (since it would otherwise be idle) due to popularity contest.

Why does it need to stat files that packages install in the first place? Can't it just trust that dpkg(1) reports installed packages correctly?