I/O slows down the system

grizlak · 2011-08-06 17:22:45

Hi,

Can you suggest any techniques for making I/O operations "lighter" on the system as a whole?

I have a fairly modern workstation (Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, standard SATA hard disk) running standard Arch kernel. I run a very light environment (dwm) and usually have several applications running at the same time, but nothing resources-heavy (Firefox, Thunderbird, a couple terminals). The system works great in terms of speed and reactivity until a long disk operation kicks in. Once I start copying or moving big files (or big numbers of files) around, either between partitions on the HDD, or between the HDD and let's say an USB stick, the applications become very slow and operations such as switching between virtual workspaces take ages.

Any suggestions? Any settings or kernel tweaks that can help here?

Stebalien · 2011-08-06 17:57:18

You can try the ck, pf, or zen kernel (with bfq enabled) and/or try setting the io priority of long-running io-intensive tasks to idle (or at least a lower priority).

ionice -c 3 <command>
-- or --
ionice -c 3 -p <pid>

Last edited by Stebalien (2011-08-06 17:58:58)

nawitus · 2011-08-07 12:24:57

I remember reading that vm.swappiness has an effect here (try increasing it) How large is your swap partition? Also try different I/O schedulers (like deadline if you're using jfs).

graysky · 2011-08-07 12:40:24

If your hdd has NCQ and AHCI enabled, try noop as your IO scheduler rather than cfq.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=123427

Arch Linux

#1 2011-08-06 17:22:45

I/O slows down the system

#2 2011-08-06 17:57:18

Re: I/O slows down the system

#3 2011-08-07 12:24:57

Re: I/O slows down the system

#4 2011-08-07 12:40:24

Re: I/O slows down the system

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