Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Poor desktop responsiveness with background I/O-operations | Date | Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:51:47 -0400 | From | Sanjoy Mahajan <> |
| |
Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:
> can you try the following two things? > > echo 4096 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests > for i in `pidof kjournald` ; do ionice -c1 -p $i ; done > > to see if they help?
That helped here. The hardware is a Thinkpad T60 with 1.5GB RAM and this hard drive:
ata1.00: ATA-7: Hitachi HTE541616J9SA00, SB4OC7KP, max UDMA/100 ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
When the 'locate' daily cron job runs, or I run 'aptitude dist-upgrade' (after all packages are downloaded), or I back up /home to a USB hard drive using rsync, the desktop response badly degrades.
I'm not using a fancy desktop---just twm. An rxvt can take up to 10 seconds to start up, and I often see emacs repainting its window when it comes to the foreground. Using your settings, rxvt takes about 1 second to start up, which is a large improvement.
(The kernel is 2.6.30 with debian patches)
-Sanjoy
| |