Arch Linux

tealson

Member

Registered: 2007-06-14

Posts: 54

KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

Hello Forum,

I have a rather strange problem. When I copy lots of data (past 50gb) from my external esata case (which is connected through a pcmcia device) on my laptop's internal 2,5" hard disk my whole laptop behaves quite laggy. Although the cpu load never gets past 20% after a while kde simply dies. I cannot move my mouse and the screen gets blank and fromt he noise of the hard disk I can tell that the copy procedure dies instantly.

Now where is the problem? Is it the harddisk? The pcmcia esata device? Or even KDE4? I have no idea how to proceed because I don't want to loose or harm my data (my whole life at the university is on it).

Kind Regards,
tealson

ps: hope the forum is correct, I have the assumption that it is indeed a kde4 problem,  otherwise please move it!

Last edited by tealson (2009-05-13 11:20:50)

Solid1986Snake

Member

Registered: 2007-06-18

Posts: 258

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

Myybe try cp from command line? or rsync it.... than we could see if it is a kde problem or not

Zariel

Member

Registered: 2008-10-07

Posts: 446

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

What kernel areyou using and whats the output of cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler (off the top of my head :E)

tealson

Member

Registered: 2007-06-14

Posts: 54

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

I rsynced the files now, this worked without kde to restart. With some guys from irc I figured out it should be connected to the scheduler. I already tried to ionice the task to "idle" but this didn't help much. At least kde did not die although the whole box was unuseable. If someone has an idea how to improve this behavior it would be nice

hacosta

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2006-10-22

Posts: 423

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

The activity is probably related to nepomuk trying to index all the new data.. disabling it might help (you'll of course lose the indexing)

tealson

Member

Registered: 2007-06-14

Posts: 54

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

The scheduler for both disks is:

 cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]
cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]

uname -a
Linux T5Punkt000 2.6.29-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat May 9 12:47:43 UTC 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Indexing is of course disabled and never was activated, I know where my stuff is ;-)

anrxc

Member

From: Croatia

Registered: 2008-03-22

Posts: 834

Website

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

See this article for some pointers, but don't expect miracles http://rudd-o.com/en/linux-and-free-sof … o-fix-that
You should also know that Linux 2.6.30 finally got some improvements in this regard, with emphasis on ext3 http://lwn.net/Articles/328363/

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b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

The activity is probably related to nepomuk trying to index all the new data.. disabling it might help (you'll of course lose the indexing)

nepomuk is fairly light on cpu usage after its initial indexing. And deactivates itself when the cpu is needed elsewhere. Shouldn't be a problem.

tealson

Member

Registered: 2007-06-14

Posts: 54

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

Alright I figured something out: when I run rsync between my external esata ext3 device and my internal ext3 I get a very high system load and my kde4.2 hangs for a few seconds from time to time, so far so bad. 
But now I'm running a rsync between two esata devices. One is ext3 and the other ext4 and my system reacts much quicker then befor.
I'm not quite sure if its related the the hardware (2xesata) or the filesystem, maybe I'll check this out on the weekend.
-Regards, tealson

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

The activity is probably related to nepomuk trying to index all the new data.. disabling it might help (you'll of course lose the indexing)

nepomuk is fairly light on cpu usage after its initial indexing. And deactivates itself when the cpu is needed elsewhere. Shouldn't be a problem.

wrong:
nepomuk affects I/O as does any indexing service. It takes a lot of memory. It is really sad but windows allow to disable indexing services completely, KDE 4 does not because nepomukserver is launched in spite of the fact that strigi (whatever indexing service) is disabled.

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

broch is right. Try disabling Strigi and then hover your mouse over a huge PDF or other such file. Better yet, try to move it to another Dolphin window, or open its Properties. Once you hit 40MiB or so, it's better to give up.

Rasi

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-14

Posts: 1,914

Website

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

pacman -S irqbalance

/etc/rc.d/irqbalance start

CAN help quite a lot with such things...

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jun

Member

Registered: 2009-02-27

Posts: 19

Re: KDE 'dies' under heavy harddisk activity

pacman -S irqbalance

/etc/rc.d/irqbalance start

CAN help quite a lot with such things...

IRQBalance helps a lot. Presumably I need to add this to the list of daemons in /etc/rc.conf to get it to load at boot? If so, does the order it loads matter?