Arch Linux

DanGray

Member

Registered: 2004-08-15

Posts: 23

X very sluggish during disk activity...

Hi,

Recently, X has become very sluggish when disk activity is taking place. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a read or write operation. The pointer freezes and judders across the screen and everything basically stops until the disk access is finished. Usually this is only a problem with large data transfers, but if i'm backing up files or compressing archives it's really annoying! Transfers to USB disks have the same effect.

Does anyone have any idea as to why this may be happening?

Thanks
   Dan

Aperculum

Member

From: Finland

Registered: 2007-01-24

Posts: 16

Re: X very sluggish during disk activity...

Hi DanGray,

Usually any computer will get sluggish if there's high IO going on, although it shouldn't affect programs which a totally on RAM. Are you sure some app isn't filling your memory and force your computer to use swap? That's one thing I imagine could affect your X.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: X very sluggish during disk activity...

See hdparm -Tt

It sounds like you don't have DMA enabled, especially if your hdparm results are very low. Those links should explain which kernel modules to load/blacklist.

DanGray

Member

Registered: 2004-08-15

Posts: 23

Re: X very sluggish during disk activity...

I have had mixed results with hdparm - in particular enabling dma seems to help but I have an hdparm line in my rc.local and if I try to enable dma there I get a system lock-up on boot when the command is executed.

Not a memory issue - It's not the most recent laptop but has 1gb of RAM. I've been using ARCH since 2004 and this problem seems to be recent (in the past six months or so) but I can't seem to find any cause for it.

Does anyone know of any changes to the Kernel? I'm using anticipatory scheduling at the moment but have also used CFQ and the results when it comes to disk access slow-down are about the same.

Mikko777

Member

From: Suomi, Finland

Registered: 2006-10-30

Posts: 837

Re: X very sluggish during disk activity...

Yes! You are definately not alone, unrarring for example freezes firefox totally. Used to work just fine before the new scheduler came in i think.

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