Hi Phill, You can use ionice -c 3 (idle) to reduce load of command, and with -p of an existing pid. However, I'd recommend that you check your dmesg / logs for drive errors. Sounds like it might be a drive going bad. If your drive supports SMART, check using the smart tools. Finally, if all that checks out, run an fsck from a livecd on your unmounted filesystem to make sure there are no errors there.
Cheers, sV On 22 April 2010 08:02, Phill Coxon <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm currently running KUbuntu 8.04.4. > > I'll be upgrading to KUbuntu 10.04 LTS in a few days so it's possible > that the upgrade will fix this problem but I'll ask anyway. > > I've been having this ongoing problem with certain tasks doing massive > disk I/O that results in the desktop becoming completely unresponsive. > > Guilty tasks include updatedb, Amarok rebuilding it's collection data > and VMWare starting up or shutting down - basically any task that is > doing a very large amount of reading from the main drive. > > When this is happening my desktop can become unusable for 30-90 seconds. > Opening a new shell can take 30-45 seconds to appear, applications will > pretty much freeze until the disk calms down. > > Is there any way to place limits so that a particular task can't hog all > of the disk I/O at the expense of everything else? > > The drive is a Western Digital 320Gb 16Mb SATA II, ext3 file system. > > Thanks! > > > > >
