On 12/02/2009 05:19 PM, Willie Wong wrote:
On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 03:50:30PM +0200, Penguin Lover Nikos Chantziaras
squawked:
On 12/02/2009 01:22 PM, Dirk Uys wrote:
This has been bothering me for some time now. I have a Dell PC at work,
Intel Core2 Duo with 4gb ram etc. Whenever something does a lot of disk
access, the PC slows down to a halt? I remember some issue between
Firefox and the kernel causing long pauses, but I've had several
different kernel versions running.
[...]
It's a known problem. I have the same issue. But there is a solution:
start disk I/O heavy tasks with "ionice -c3". For emerge, this can be done
automatically by putting this in your make.conf:
PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="ionice -c 3 -p \${PID}"
ionice is in sys-apps/util-linux so it should be installed already.
Hum, I had forgotten about this command. It would have come in handy a
few days ago. But in the case of FireFox, wouldn't that make it worse?
No. If you run other tasks as "ionice -c3" they will stop blocking Firefox.
Also, what do you mean by known problem? What sort of set-up causes
the problem? Is this related at all to the hardware used? Or is this
purely in software?
No, it's related to the Linux kernel blocking other applications for too
long when one of them does heavy I/O. This is done so that each task
has a chance to get more work done for the amount of time it gets to do
I/O. As you can imagine, this hurts non-server systems quite badly.
Another solution is to buy more hard disks and set up a RAID.
