On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Nathan Coulson <[email protected]> wrote: > Something I have been thinking about, My computer can be near > unusable if I am doing too much I/O tasks at once (let's say writing > 0's to one drive, while running a backup on another [using two hard > drives]). Programs that do not use hard drives at all are almost > unusable. > > [and if you are curious why I was doing that, Was recovering data > from a dying harddrive for a friend, and wanted to ensure the "new" > ancient harddrive (40GB) I salvaged was stable]. > > Compared to earlier systems, my machine feels like a powerhouse (AMD > 890GX w/ Integrated Graphics, Phenom ][ 945 processor [X4, 3GHz], 4GB > 1333mhz Ram, 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD). Was surprised when I realized I > can slow it down without even using the processor. > > although, i recall my AMD Duron 800Mhz system felt like a powerhouse > as well... but mycommon workload seems to consist of openbox, > firefox, urxvt, vim, and compiling software packages. > > > What am I seeing? What defines the limit of I/O Traffic on a system? > > -- > Nathan Coulson (conathan) > ------ > Location: British Columbia, Canada > Timezone: PST (-8) > Webpage: http://www.nathancoulson.com > -- > http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat > FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ > Unsubscribe: See the above information page >
For what it is, it's the I/O scheduler not sharing its toys with other processes, from what I've found. As for what to do about it, you might experiment with the different schedulers available in the kernel, see which works best for your everyday workload, but something I've found a fair bit more handy in practice... is mixing nice and ionice for things that bring the system to a crawl. While both are likely to increase the time to completion of whatever tasks it is you're running with them, they do quite wonderfully when it comes to keeping a system responsive, and if you want shortest time to completion more than responsiveness, you will probably want to avoid interrupting it with other processes anyhow. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
