Very Slow Disks

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 13:19:01

I have a workstation which is about 2 years old. CPU is 2G dual core which I guess dates it basically. Has 2G RAM. Here is a bit about the disks:

$ df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev                     10240       168     10072   2% /dev
/dev/disk/by-uuid/d9383ddd-35dd-406a-b0d1-1fe7a753d9b5
                      24027656  14840984   7966136  66% /
none                   1031820      2060   1029760   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1               186663     14280    162746   9% /boot
/dev/sdb5             96124904  27905780  63336172  31% /srv
/dev/sdb6            183475692 135849188  38306396  79% /home

The second one is a virtual mount via ssh I think.

Anyhow, I just now decided to delete a few files from /tmp and the PC just about froze up--the CPU meter of Xfce was on 100% and the delete popup window from Thunar just sat there for at least 10 seconds.

I have seen this machine get slower and slower over the past year and I haven't figured it out. But this seems crazy...

Any ideas?

stqn · 2010-07-26 13:23:46

Maybe Thunar was copying the files to /home where your trash folder is. I have this problem with Thunar and external drives (Thunar doesn't use local .Trash folders) so I added a custom action "delete" that simply calls "rm -r %f".

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 13:53:40

Well, firstly all of the drives there are all internal--it's just one big hard drive. Secondly, even if you are right that it's copying to /home, it shouldn't take so much time, should it?

Perhaps my /home at 79% is too full????

I am running on it now Graphical Disk Map to see if I can remove something.

karol · 2010-07-26 14:07:13

> Anyhow, I just now decided to delete a few files from /tmp
How few? Maybe there were thousands of files.

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 14:18:24

> How few? Maybe there were thousands of files.

No, there were only like 50 files there and I deleted maybe 20.

But I just removed 15G to get

/dev/sdb6            183475692 119654308  54501276  69% /home

and I tell you it already seems better! A lot of junk was sitting in my trash in Thunar. Maybe I should take out some more and it will be even better!

Not sure about that but it really does seem like that was part of the problem.

Thanks for the ideas. I really appreciate it.

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 19:34:43

I just started deleting other junk from my trash folder. I deleted I think 807 items at once, mostly directories, and it took 41 minutes. That's for sure crazy. But anyhow now I have:

/dev/sdb6              188G   105G    74G  59% /home

which is good.

karol · 2010-07-26 19:39:24

You did fsck you disk, right?
Are you downloading thousands of torrents at once or what? 40 minutes?? I can burn down Rome faster than you can take out your digital trash!

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 19:48:53

karol wrote:

You did fsck you disk, right?

You have failed to realize that I am an idiot, heh heh. I don't even know what that is. OK, now I looked it up and I see what it is. I think Arch checks my disks when I reboot and I usually shut down (power down completely) this workstation every week when I take a day off. But I don't know what it does. Should I do fsck? Seems I must unmount the disks. Seems I would have to exit Xfce and unmount and then run it. I guess. I'm not sure.

karol wrote:

Are you downloading thousands of torrents at once or what? 40 minutes?? I can burn down Rome faster than you can take out your digital trash!

I download a torrent about once a year. I download Drupal modules all the time and upload them to sites I work or I download a whole site and work on it here and then delete it. That was most of the trash.

I never tried burning down Rome but I think it would take at least an hour. Probably longer. Although I also was mildly shocked at this 40 minute thing. And it used up a good bit of the CPU the whole time.

I have been wanting to replace this machine b/c it's getting slower by the day. Seems I am narrowing down on the problem. Maybe...

karol · 2010-07-26 20:00:18

> Arch checks my disks when I reboot
> Seems I would have to exit Xfce and unmount and then run it. I guess. I'm not sure.
Close all apps and fire up some terminal. Type

sudo shutdown -Fr now

it will reboot your computer and force fsck.

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 20:44:50

I did that. I watched part of it when it rebooted and it didn't seem to find any errors. The first 3 partitions had around 1%, 12% and 1% non-contiguous files. That's about it.

I just now deleted 100 files from trash. As a test. They went instantly.

Then I did 500 and it took 4 seconds. Well that's what it claimed. In reality it took more like 13.

Then I did 900 files and it flashed 27 seconds and then said 13. It actually took 24 seconds before Thunar refreshed with the new list, indicating to me it was really done.

Sounds better, but last time it was a LOT of directories and now it's just files so I don't think I can really compare.

karol · 2010-07-26 20:53:46

> Then I did 500 and it took 4 seconds. Well that's what it claimed. In reality it took more like 13.
How do you measure this? 'time rm -rf *.jpg'?
http://www.xkcd.com/612/

> Sounds better, but last time it was a LOT of directories and now it's just files so I don't think I can really compare.
Create a bunch of directories and compare.

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-26 21:10:32

How did I measure it? I looked at the clock. Not very scientific.

Even if I would create directories I don't know what was in those I deleted in the 40-minute-burn-Rome thing. There were a LOT of template directories in there, meaning temporary template files (from a web app) and I have NO IDEA what was in those, whether it was 20 files or 2000 per directory...

ewaller · 2010-07-26 22:24:29

Is there a chance you have bad sectors on your disk? I've seen a system come to it's knees while dealing with hard to read sectors.

You might check dmesg for I/O errors.

lagagnon · 2010-07-26 23:11:44

At 70% full now on your /home partition, and you were at 79% before. I suspect it might even get higher than that when you started doing browser downloads, browser temp cache, etc, probably got close to 100% and then no wonder you started lagging. I suggest you really clean up /home and/or increase the size of that partition so it doesn't happen again - or disable the trash in Thunar.

CaptainKirk · 2010-07-27 09:46:41

I don't see anything in dmesg: http://pastebin.com/BNcJJJZ4

lagagnon, thanks for the advice--makes sense.

dmz · 2010-07-27 12:15:30

I created and deleted 100.001 files on some filesystems.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-07-26 13:19:01

Very Slow Disks

#2 2010-07-26 13:23:46

Re: Very Slow Disks

#3 2010-07-26 13:53:40

Re: Very Slow Disks

#4 2010-07-26 14:07:13

Re: Very Slow Disks

#5 2010-07-26 14:18:24

Re: Very Slow Disks

#6 2010-07-26 19:34:43

Re: Very Slow Disks

#7 2010-07-26 19:39:24

Re: Very Slow Disks

#8 2010-07-26 19:48:53

Re: Very Slow Disks

#9 2010-07-26 20:00:18

Re: Very Slow Disks

#10 2010-07-26 20:44:50

Re: Very Slow Disks

#11 2010-07-26 20:53:46

Re: Very Slow Disks

#12 2010-07-26 21:10:32

Re: Very Slow Disks

#13 2010-07-26 22:24:29

Re: Very Slow Disks

#14 2010-07-26 23:11:44

Re: Very Slow Disks

#15 2010-07-27 09:46:41

Re: Very Slow Disks

#16 2010-07-27 12:15:30

Re: Very Slow Disks

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