Arch Linux

nick122147

Member

Registered: 2007-05-17

Posts: 33

Copying slows down everything

I had a mac (g4 800mhz) for 4 years, and when I was "steadying" my hard drive I could easily copy 5 or more big file or directories while I continued to browse in Finder. Sure, it was a bit more slow while copying all this, but it was no big problem. Therefor I was very surpirce when I got a windows PC(dual core 2ghz 1gb ram)  to see that if I copied one big directory or file, it became very slow, if I tried two different the whole system almost stopped responding. CPU still at 0 or 1%.

Because of the unix background, I thought that Linux would be better at this. But Ubuntu was responding about as Windows. When I came to Arch it seemed to be a bit better, but it still is a problem to copy 2 big files from a partition to another while doing browing in nautilus. I tried KDE for a weekend, and in Konqueror it seemed even much more slower.

I have tried the ck kernel, but I havn't noticed a very big difference.

So I'm wondering:

Why is finder/mac osx so good at this? or is it something about the powerpc architechture?

What can be done to make this better in Linux? Kernel konfiguration?

Is it a feature in Finder that makes it behave better?

How is the freebsd kernel in this aspect?

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions

Steinar

kano

Member

From: Michigan

Registered: 2007-05-04

Posts: 185

Website

Re: Copying slows down everything

It might be the filesystem. I know on my desktop with XFS (using a kernel that has -ck aswell) copying a large file (10gb) from one drive to another, there's no noticable slow down. Thunar takes an extra second and a half to load the directory listing, but everything else is smooth.

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\\ archlinux on a XPS M1530 //

roguetr

Member

Registered: 2006-10-15

Posts: 26

Re: Copying slows down everything

My vote is for filesystem.

I have always run *BSD and when I decided to run linux, chose reiser as my main filesystem.

It wasn't until I had to reinstall and chose ext3 that I noticed transfers and deleting large quantities of data would drag the system to a crawl.

I've now switched back to reiser and don't see the problem anymore.

Sarton

Mikko777

Member

From: Suomi, Finland

Registered: 2006-10-30

Posts: 837

Re: Copying slows down everything

My guess is that mac hardware was better...

Prolly had scsi drive with good controller? (ain't a mac fanboy but for costing twice as much as pc I think they should have atleast some better hardware for video / audio editing )

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Planet KDE | Opendesktop.org | Chakra Project

nick122147

Member

Registered: 2007-05-17

Posts: 33

Re: Copying slows down everything

My mac has a 4200 ata disc, and my new sony laptop has a 5400 sata disc. So this shouldn't make so much difference? I'm not an expert in disc hardware.. what is the controller doing?

Filesystem could be some of it. Ubuntu is slower on my machine, and I have ext3 on that partition. Arch is reiserfs. But I still think arch and reiserfs is slower (for copying) than mac osx/hfs+.

I guess to compare, I should install Linux with ext3 on my mac! Or mac osx on my pc.

nick122147

Member

Registered: 2007-05-17

Posts: 33

Re: Copying slows down everything

I´m responding to this year old thread I started, just to say that I in fact tried installing mac osx on the same vaio pc. And guess what, it behaved just like my old powerbook. I mean I could copy many files at once, with only minor slowdowns.

I also tried different filesystem (on linux) before installing osx, and it didn´t seem to make a big difference. My guess is that its some feature in the mac kernel or some thing that makes the copying go with lower priority on osx so that it wont mess up (slow down) everything else. Any other thoughts?

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: Copying slows down everything

I´m responding to this year old thread I started, just to say that I in fact tried installing mac osx on the same vaio pc. And guess what, it behaved just like my old powerbook. I mean I could copy many files at once, with only minor slowdowns.

I also tried different filesystem (on linux) before installing osx, and it didn´t seem to make a big difference. My guess is that its some feature in the mac kernel or some thing that makes the copying go with lower priority on osx so that it wont mess up (slow down) everything else. Any other thoughts?

I would blame the I/O scheduler of the kernel. I'm not really sure how this landscape is in linux currently, as I'm too busy with work to experiment much now, but it used to be that many different scheduling policies were available. Google linux i/o schedulers or something similar and see if you can still switch between schedulers for block devices. If so, switch to a different scheduler and see if the behavior you want is produced.