Hi Alan :)
* Alan Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dixit:
> > My system is a bit modest: a 7 years old motheboard with VIA686B, a
> > 1900+ Athlon XP, but with plenty of RAM (1280MB + 1GB swap). I know, if
> > I want more hard disk performance I should buy a new box with SATA or
> > whatever, but the fact is that I hadn't problems with the same hardware
> > and kernel 2.4.x. I need 2.6.x, so I cannot go back to 2.4.x.
>
> Disk is actually less likely to be a problem than PCI bus bandwidth - the
> older VIA boards seem quite happy to fill the PCI bus solid during bursts
> of disk I/O
I was supposing something in that line, since disk speed is quite
high (when I only read or write but not both). I just didn't think about
PCI bandwidth.
> > bad idea too, where should I look for culprits so I can tweak the system
> > a bit and improve disk performance? I'm not 100% sure that the problem
>
> You might want to try the reverse if you have a UDMA100 or UDMA133 drive
> then setting the speed down to UDMA66 definitely evens out the behaviour
> of VIA boards when doing video capture. I don't know if it helps playback.
Won't that reduce disk performance when using just one disk? I don't
pass much data between disks (or even copy data within one disk), so not
being able to watch movies while copying data is, for me, more
acceptable than having a slower disk all the time.
And yes, all my disks are UDMA100.
Is there a way of changing chipset behaviour from userspace so PCI
bus is not filled during IO bursts?
Thanks a lot for your answer, Alan :)
Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado
--
Linux Registered User 88736 | http://www.dervishd.net
It's my PC and I'll cry if I want to... RAmen!
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