Arch Linux

gururise

Member

Registered: 2011-11-03

Posts: 33

System Slows to a Crawl with High Disk I/O

Running Kernel 4.9.11-1-ARCH
Intel i7-3770 @ 3.4 Ghz w/32 GB of RAM
Nvidia GTX 750ti GPU

Latest Gnome Shell Desktop

total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:       32915264     4967428    22804664      536056     5143172    26947020
Swap:      16700412           0    16700412

I have a 120GB SSD (/dev/sda) as my root partition, only /var and /home are on my 2TB 7200 RPM HDD (/dev/sdb)

dev              16452560          0  16452560   0% /dev
run              16457632       1620  16456012   1% /run
/dev/sda1       106097760   77967236  22717976  78% /
tmpfs            16457632     523084  15934548   4% /dev/shm
tmpfs            16457632          0  16457632   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs             7340032       7396   7332636   1% /tmp
/dev/sdb2        52351504   21385940  28283608  44% /var
/dev/sdb1      2831678104 2022825412 664988640  76% /home
tmpfs             3291524         16   3291508   1% /run/user/120
tmpfs             3291524         44   3291480   1% /run/user/1000

I am using the CFQ I/O scheduler for my HDD and the noop scheduler for the SSD.

Whenever there is high disk I/O on my HDD, my system will slow to a crawl... even moving the mouse pointer stutters.  This will happen sometimes when Chrome crashes and begins to clear the cache or if I load VMWARE and there is heavy disk I/O.  Basically anytime there is heavy disk I/O, the usability of my system nearly drops to zero.  I'm at a complete loss as how to fix it.. Can anyone help?

Last edited by gururise (2017-02-22 17:42:48)

olegabrielz

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2015-12-23

Posts: 255

Re: System Slows to a Crawl with High Disk I/O

Please be aware of my Newbie Powers.
This is just a hunch. Is it a desktop PC? In that case have you tried change to another sata connector on the motherboard? Sounds like both SSD and HDD are competing for the ressources of the same channel. I may be completely off target. Like I've already mentioned: Newbie Powers!!

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Be aware of my Newbie Powers

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,213

Re: System Slows to a Crawl with High Disk I/O

> Latest Gnome Shell Desktop
Same problem with eg. icewm or fluxbox?

Edit:
Same problem with "gnome on xorg"?

latest gnome is still 3.22, so unless you're on nouveau or modesetting rather than the nvidia blob (lsmod) you're not running gnome on wayland.

Last edited by seth (2017-02-23 10:22:21)

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