How do I solve periodic mouse lag on Linux Mint (MATE)?

I have a laptop with the latest Linux Mint installed (the MATE version, not the Cinnamon one). 80-90% of the time everything works great, but periodically the mouse will start "lagging" heavily (it will feel sluggish to respond and the cursor move at maybe 20% normal speed). This problem comes and goes without any apparent cause. It occurs with both a USB mouse as well as the laptop's touchpad. I didn't have this issue with an older version of Mint, though.

I've tried to Google for someone else who solved this issue, but because of the general nature of the terms involved ("mouse", "linux", "lag", etc.) I just find a lot of unrelated pages.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can diagnose what is causing this strange mouse lag (and ideally, how I can solve it)?

* EDIT *

Here's a sample of top output during the lag:

top - 20:10:27 up 34 days, 22:31,  4 users,  load average: 2.36, 1.19, 0.65
Tasks: 192 total,   2 running, 190 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  5.8 us, 24.8 sy,  0.0 ni, 68.5 id,  0.4 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.5 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   4032688 total,  3475752 used,   556936 free,   202180 buffers
KiB Swap:  8787516 total,   137556 used,  8649960 free,  1768748 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
21961 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  20.9  0.0   0:12.82 kworker/1:0       
21762 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  11.3  0.0   0:12.05 kworker/0:2       
 5780 me        20   0  181m  26m  16m S   9.3  0.7 271:41.38 mate-system-mon   
21733 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   7.6  0.0   0:16.24 kworker/1:1       
21956 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   7.3  0.0   0:13.10 kworker/0:0       
21879 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   3.7  0.0   0:03.25 kworker/u:2       
23920 me        20   0  425m  85m  16m S   3.3  2.2 148:23.44 chrome            
20013 me        20   0  426m 198m  27m S   2.0  5.0   5:53.41 chrome            
  852 me        20   0  170m  13m  10m S   1.0  0.3   1:43.49 mate-terminal     
 2283 root      20   0  132m  26m  10m S   1.0  0.7 140:33.62 Xorg              
11361 me        20   0 1054m 212m  26m S   1.0  5.4 119:45.32 eclipse           
23766 me        20   0  644m 179m  39m S   1.0  4.6 156:13.04 chrome            
19035 couchdb   20   0 86672 5120 1484 S   0.7  0.1 314:22.75 beam.smp          
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.3  0.0   6:08.10 ksoftirqd/1       
 2453 me        20   0 38796 1824 1680 S   0.3  0.0   2:31.55 gvfs-afc-volume   
 5776 me        20   0  105m 8376 6772 S   0.3  0.2   1:48.06 multiload-apple   
18074 me        20   0 69836  14m 3808 S   0.3  0.4   9:23.07 python            

Here's a tail of running dmesg (dmesg gives a lot of output, thus the tail):

[2844570.290434] type=1701 audit(1358135321.797:17): auid=4294967295 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=4294967295 pid=6593 comm="chrome" reason="seccomp" sig=0 syscall=20 compat=0 ip=0xb3599424 code=0x50000
[2855118.278240] stereo mode not supported
[2891634.104527] stereo mode not supported
[2929390.761034] stereo mode not supported
[2930948.986039] stereo mode not supported
[2931457.828088] stereo mode not supported
[2936251.706768] stereo mode not supported
[2939573.402914] stereo mode not supported
[2940015.539524] stereo mode not supported
[2977473.595590] stereo mode not supported

As per @grs's answer, here's the tail of my /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

[2940015.539] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines:
[2940015.539] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1366x768"x0.0   69.30  1366 1414 1446 1456  768 771 777 793 -hsync -vsync (47.6 kHz eP)
[2977473.595] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "AUO", prod id 4140
[2977473.595] (II) intel(0): DDCModeFromDetailedTiming: Ignoring: We don't handle stereo.
[2977473.595] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines:
[2977473.595] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1366x768"x0.0   69.30  1366 1414 1446 1456  768 771 777 793 -hsync -vsync (47.6 kHz eP)
[3020717.050] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "AUO", prod id 4140
[3020717.050] (II) intel(0): DDCModeFromDetailedTiming: Ignoring: We don't handle stereo.
[3020717.050] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines:
[3020717.050] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1366x768"x0.0   69.30  1366 1414 1446 1456  768 771 777 793 -hsync -vsync (47.6 kHz eP)

I found the following solution on Ask Ubuntu:

sudo -i
echo N> /sys/module/drm_kms_helper/parameters/poll
echo "options drm_kms_helper poll=N">/etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

It definitively solved the problem for me, and after more than a week of testing I can confirm it stopped the mouse lag for me.

Judging by the relatively high %sy value in top and based on your statement that the same hardware used to work correctly before the upgrade, I think the lag is caused by a driver. It is unusual for a healthy, almost idle system to spend so much time in kernel mode. I just checked that Linux Mint 14 is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and uses kernel 3.5. It would be curious to see if any errors are recorded in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

Your options to solve this are fairly limited:

1. try different mouse;
2. try LiveCD on another distro/version;
3. try different graphical interface;
4. live with it (I am running Linux Mint Debian Edition and on random bases my left button refuses to work and it comes back by itself. I learned to work around this);
5. get older or newer mouse module for your kernel (provided you know how).

If it is that terrible, you may want to get 2.6.x family kernel installed. There is a chance it will "break" something else and probably you would need to compile it.

I don't know if this one is still a problem? ... However I had the same issue with the mouse lag in Linux Mint 14 x64 Cinnamon. I tried anything ... different kernels, updating drivers - nothing worked.

Anyway the surprisingly magic solution was to unklick the option "Disable touchpad while typing" in the mouse settings. This setting seems to cause heavy problems randomly.

I hope this might help somebody else out there!

Note that on newer kernels the drm_kms_helper module may not be loaded by default. One extra step gets this working:

sudo su -
modprobe drm_kms_helper
echo N> /sys/module/drm_kms_helper/parameters/poll
echo "drm_kms_helper" >> /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf
echo "options drm_kms_helper poll=N" >> /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

Hope that helps someone!