computer freezes when I copy large files

hybrid · 2010-02-04 14:38:43

Hi there, whenever I copy large files or when there is just a lot of hdd activity my computer kinda freezes for a second or two. It's not like a complete lockup until the copying is finished, I can switch workspaces on my desktop perfectly but pretty much any application that is running will not react to my input either for a few seconds or until the hdd activity is over.
Example: I just copied a large file (1.3gb) and I couldn't write in firefox until the copying process was over. copying took 51.708s, so the throughput seems fine to me.
Another example: I'm watching TV (kaffeine) if I copy a large file or there's just hdd for a couple seconds both sound and video stop or are stuttering extremely (maybe like every other second there will be sound for a fraction of a second and maybe every couple seconds there will be another "picture" in the videostream, mostly black with a bunch of colored artifacts).
Even when I'm working on the terminal it feels somewhat "laggy" when there's a lot of hdd activity, but not too bad. E.g. vim may take a few (maybe 2-5) seconds to load even small files (just tested it with a 4.0K plain text file) but that's about it. When I type the characters I type will show up immediately as usual.
The CPU usage does not spike up at all!

The harddisk is a Seagate Barracuda (SATA), SATA mode is set to AHCI in BIOS (Award BIOS on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, latest Gigabyte BIOS F14). I'm only using Arch's kernels.

$ lsmod | grep ata
ata_piix               17725  0 
ata_generic             2235  0 
pata_jmicron            1616  0 
pata_acpi               2264  0 
libata                135162  5 ata_piix,ahci,ata_generic,pata_jmicron,pata_acpi
scsi_mod               78933  3 sg,sd_mod,libata

If you need more information just let me know. :>

wuischke · 2010-02-04 14:45:43

Which file system(s) do you use?

SemiBz · 2010-02-04 14:58:52

I've had this problem for a while now - no matter which file system I use, whenever I download something via bittorent or copy files larger than 1Gb, the computer completely freezes ( literally, as previously described, even Terminal is unusable ).

hybrid · 2010-02-04 17:39:55

Filesystem is ext3 on all partitions (/, /usr, /home, /var) except /tmp (reiser3).

RJARRRPCGP · 2010-02-05 01:43:22

hybrid wrote:

Hi there, whenever I copy large files or when there is just a lot of hdd activity my computer kinda freezes for a second or two. It's not like a complete lockup until the copying is finished, I can switch workspaces on my desktop perfectly but pretty much any application that is running will not react to my input either for a few seconds or until the hdd activity is over.
Example: I just copied a large file (1.3gb) and I couldn't write in firefox until the copying process was over. copying took 51.708s, so the throughput seems fine to me.
Another example: I'm watching TV (kaffeine) if I copy a large file or there's just hdd for a couple seconds both sound and video stop or are stuttering extremely (maybe like every other second there will be sound for a fraction of a second and maybe every couple seconds there will be another "picture" in the videostream, mostly black with a bunch of colored artifacts).
Even when I'm working on the terminal it feels somewhat "laggy" when there's a lot of hdd activity, but not too bad. E.g. vim may take a few (maybe 2-5) seconds to load even small files (just tested it with a 4.0K plain text file) but that's about it. When I type the characters I type will show up immediately as usual.
The CPU usage does not spike up at all!
The harddisk is a Seagate Barracuda (SATA), SATA mode is set to AHCI in BIOS (Award BIOS on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, latest Gigabyte BIOS F14). I'm only using Arch's kernels.
$ lsmod | grep ata
ata_piix               17725  0 
ata_generic             2235  0 
pata_jmicron            1616  0 
pata_acpi               2264  0 
libata                135162  5 ata_piix,ahci,ata_generic,pata_jmicron,pata_acpi
scsi_mod               78933  3 sg,sd_mod,libata
If you need more information just let me know. :>

If you have a Seagate, I'm afraid that's the problem, because I had problems with Seagate HDDs having slow sectors. Lagging appears to be common with Seagate HDDs.

hybrid · 2010-02-05 12:02:27

That doesn't really convince me, rjarrpcgp. :>
Why would slow sectors cause temporary freezes? That doesn't make sense. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong but if there was something like slow sectors wouldn't that be something the SATA controller or the hdd itself would have to worry about? So why would that interfere with let's say watching TV? The TV stream shouldn't 'touch' (and therefore not be affected by) the hdd.
Where did you find reports on that by the way? I could only find 2 users reporting lags and suspecting their hdd but they didn't answer when they were asked for details. Fishy. :>
Freezing is also not listed as a common issue here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for any response, but I guess I'd like to understand or verify this as a common issue.

grey · 2010-02-05 12:20:40

What mount options are you using? In particular, are you using noatime or nodiratime? If not, you could try noatime (see the wiki entry on fstab for more info) and see if it helps.

cool · 2010-02-06 05:44:16

What is your Hardware config(CPU,RAM?) and what DM you use(Gnome,KDE ?)

If yout config is old, maybe your system is being overloaded

hybrid · 2010-02-07 11:36:16

All my partitions are being mounted with defaults (rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async). I'll give noatime a try.

Used hardware:
CPU: Intel C2Q Q6700
MoBo: Gigabyte GA-965p-ds3
RAM: 2GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce 9800GTX
HDD: ST3750640AS

I don't use a DE, my WM is Fluxbox tainted with a few KDE libs for kaffeine though.

MAroco · 2010-02-07 13:56:52

Just that you don't feel so alone
I see similar lags with large file operations here, especially when creating DVD-isos or copying large files around. Appears regardless of which DE I use (Compiz Standalone, E16, Fluxbox - though the effect is more pronounced in compiz). Here are the specs:
Gigabyte GA-EX58 (Intel ICH10 SATA Controller)
Intel Core i7 920 CPU
6 GB RAM
Ati Radon HD4870
HDD Western Digital WD5002ABYS 500 GB

What struck me is, I'm also on a Gigabyte Board AND I also have SATA set to AHCI...
Filesystem is ext4. I tried setting noatime and nodiratime and didn't notice a difference but I didn't measure it, just didn't *feel* different.

I recently compiled kernel26-ice with bfs patch enabled and this makes the system *feel* more responsive overall, lags don't go away though. According to gkrellm disk throughput is around 80 MB/s, which seemed ok to me. Since I don't do that much big file operations it didn't bother me enough to search for a solution and I just waited the few seconds but maybe my 2 cents help reducing the number of suspects. I guess Gigabyte AHCI may be the bad guy?

Anoher observation: when creating DVD-iso i see disk activity-monitor go up - lag occurs. When operation is finished, lag goes away, but after some seconds i see gkrellm disk activity go up for another few seconds - lag is back for that time. So it may also be some either disk-cache or ext4 reated phenomenon.

If more data, logs.... are required I'd happily provide them. Hope it helps someone...

[Edit: Oh wait you're on ext_3_ not 4 so thatbeing the cause is not so likely]

Last edited by MAroco (2010-02-07 14:01:37)

hybrid · 2010-03-04 10:54:31

Thank you for your reply :>
Well there's "only" an Intel ICH8 controller on my board. I guess I would expect Intel to have taken care of the issue in between these two controller revisions if it were a faulty SATA controller in the ICHx. But then again you never know. ;>

Here's my current BIOS settings:

Integrated Peripherals
SATA AHCI Mode                              AHCI / (Disabled)
SATA Port0-1 Native Mode                Enabled / (Disabled)
USB Controller                                 Enabled / (Disabled)
USB 2.0 Controller                           Enabled / (Disabled)
USB Keyboard Support                     Enabled / (Disabled)
USB Mouse Support                         Enabled / (Disabled)
Legacy USB storage detect                Enabled / (Disabled)
Azalia Codec                                    Disabled / (Auto)
Onboard H/W LAN                            Enabled / (Disabled)
>SMART LAN                                   Press Enter
Onboard LAN Boot ROM                    Disabled / (Enabled)
Onboard SATA/IDE Device                 Enabled / (Disabled)
Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode            (IDE) / AHCI / (RAID IDE)
Onboard Serial Port 1                        3F8/IRQ4 / (...)
Onboard Parallel Port                         378/IRQ7 / (...)
Parallel Port Mode                              SPP / (...)

This is the complete content of the integrated peripherals section. Entries in brackets mean possible options, the ones that are not bracketed are the chosen/active options.

Could someone please clarify the following entries to me:
- SATA Port0-1 Native Mode - Enabled / (Disabled)
- Onboard SATA/IDE Device - Enabled / (Disabled)
- difference between "Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode - AHCI / (IDE) / (RAID IDE)" and "SATA AHCI Mode - AHCI / (Disabled): to me it sounds like both let you toggle between AHCI mode and legacy pata emulation so where's the difference?

Is it safe to switch to the AHCI legacy pata emulation after the OS has been installed?

stony · 2010-04-02 13:30:27

Yes it is - i read that on wikipedia that you can switch off and to AHCI anytime with linux - but not with windows.

BTW; i got the same problems witha Gigabyte GA 770T-UD3P like you both do. Its really frustrating to let the copy-process run over night and see that its not ready at all after some HOURS.

Maybe i will try another kernel and see if that helps.

sigmund · 2011-02-12 12:35:05

stony wrote:

Its really frustrating to let the copy-process run over night and see that its not ready at all after some HOURS.
Maybe i will try another kernel and see if that helps.

A year after this post, I might say that things are even going worst to me. After last week update, copies that took an incredible amount of time, have now become completely undoable: 400Mb (in 2 files) from ext4 to a WDWE II Nas server with nfs took only 17 minutes (on a GBit LAN). Impossible thinking on trying a concurrent parallel copy..
More than a year ago, I would say a year and a half, I was able to run multiple concurrent copies from my core duo to the same nfs server: I saw them dinamically downgrading previous copies and - later, automatically increase speeds as soon as some transfer completed.
Then, suddenly, things changed and long files started taking lots of time: just one copy each time (no more copies to the same target, nor to others) because gnome might have freezed. I discovered that doing the same things at the command line level no more lags in gnome were going to happen and I lived - almost happily - up to last week end.
Last week end update completely destroyed my transfers: I currently have no clue on what to do to revive the transfers that I need so much to reorganize and back up my big multimedia library of screencasts (hak5, tekzilla, the ben hack show, ...).
If just 400 Mb in 2 files can take so much, imagine how much it might take when you need to move something around 200/250 GiB!
Completely out of order: be it nautilus, an xterm or a tty*...

Going to try AUR alternate kernels asap or, for another week far from the internet, I will just be complaining of it with the doubt that it might have worked if only I had just simply downloaded and installed another kernel.

iFSS · 2011-02-12 14:15:20

Just something to try - does lowering the speed of your RAM help (e.g. 800Mhz to 667Mhz)? I've seen similar problems (slow file transfers and hard freezing, both in Linux & Windows) seemingly caused by memory modules that are not quite compatible with the motherboard (i.e. not listed as compatible by the manufacturer, but they "work"). Short of changing the modules, lowering the frequency (and installing a fan on the side of the case over the north bridge if it appears to be overheating too) usually stops the issue.

sigmund · 2011-03-14 02:05:57

iFSS wrote:

... does lowering the speed of your RAM help (e.g. 800Mhz to 667Mhz)? ..

Thanks iFSS for your interesting suggestion, but it was not the case. This week updates ***automagically*** solved the problem on every affected pc.
Unfortunately I have been far from home with no inet link too many days to analyze, google, follow and discover the remote cause of the problem, so I cannot document the solution for a later reference to others.
I still, in fact, have no clue of the cause: I am suspecting the kernel, the nfs stack and gnome as well, with probably the kernel and the nfs stack the most probable, but I have no prove at all.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-02-04 14:38:43

computer freezes when I copy large files

#2 2010-02-04 14:45:43

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#3 2010-02-04 14:58:52

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#4 2010-02-04 17:39:55

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#5 2010-02-05 01:43:22

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#6 2010-02-05 12:02:27

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#7 2010-02-05 12:20:40

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#8 2010-02-06 05:44:16

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#9 2010-02-07 11:36:16

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#10 2010-02-07 13:56:52

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#11 2010-03-04 10:54:31

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#12 2010-04-02 13:30:27

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#13 2011-02-12 12:35:05

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#14 2011-02-12 14:15:20

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

#15 2011-03-14 02:05:57

Re: computer freezes when I copy large files

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