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#1 2011-11-30 21:16:50

nagi
Member
Registered: 2011-06-07
Posts: 15
Website

Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

Today I thought of moving >100MB file to my phone via USB, but executing

cp ~/Desktop/very_big_file /media/Memory\ card/

caused my machine to be nearly unusable. I investigated a little bit and found

load average: 12.27, 6.24, 2.88

in top.

I can reproduce same behaviour when copying files in Nautilus.

I can move my mouse, and gnome-shell is still pretty responsive, music still plays, but chromium doesn't load a thing and applications loads for a while.

What couldn't cause it?
Device itself - I tested it with about 3 other USB devices, including bare USB Stick on 2 different machines running Linux (same problem). On Windows it runs OK.
Hardware limits - copying was running at 1.9 MB/s, so there's no way, that my HDD would overwork itself and hang system. Also I don't have any Swap in HDD.
Wire - Tested with bunch of different wires. Also with same wire Windows worked OK.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Even tough I mentioned FAT32 in title, this behaviour happens in memory storage formatted in NTFS and EXT4 too.
EDIT2: Oh, copying to external HDD, which can pull off speeds, which are near to my internal HDD, doesn't cause this behaviour to happen.

Last edited by nagi (2011-11-30 21:23:35)

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#2 2011-11-30 21:19:37

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

There are tons of threads regarding loss of responsiveness while copying stuff to a USB, no solutions yet.

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#3 2011-11-30 21:20:47

roygbiv
Member
Registered: 2011-05-18
Posts: 204

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

Just curious - have you specified your machine's hostname in /etc/hosts?

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#4 2011-11-30 21:24:40

nagi
Member
Registered: 2011-06-07
Posts: 15
Website

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

roygbiv wrote:

Just curious - have you specified your machine's hostname in /etc/hosts?

Yes.

karol wrote:

There are tons of threads regarding loss of responsiveness while copying stuff to a USB, no solutions yet.

Can you please link to some of them? It could be a good starting material.

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#5 2011-11-30 21:30:19

SanskritFritz
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From: Budapest, Hungary
Registered: 2009-01-08
Posts: 1,923
Website

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone


zʇıɹɟʇıɹʞsuɐs AUR || Cycling in Budapest with a helmet camera || Revised log levels proposal: "FYI" "WTF" and "OMG" (John Barnette)

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#7 2011-11-30 21:39:55

Montague
Banned
Registered: 2010-06-24
Posts: 93

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

 

Last edited by Montague (2015-07-28 02:36:56)

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#8 2011-11-30 22:04:55

nagi
Member
Registered: 2011-06-07
Posts: 15
Website

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

Montague wrote:

Here are a few (the two last ones are about two years old though, so I don't know if they are still relevant)

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111575
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=70525
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=71131

I remember reading somewhere (sorry don't have a link) that this may be related to the 64bit architecture (but I don't know if you are on 32bit or 64bit)

Personnally I have experienced this behavior, but my system is kindof low specs (amd 64 athlon with only 768 MB of RAM), but I am on x86_64 (I sometimes think of going back to i686)

One thing that seemed to help me so far (but it still sometimes lag) is to use the liunux-ck-kx kernel (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux-ck)

YMMV though...

I'm indeed on x86_64. It'll be one more reason to consider moving to i686 too...

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#9 2011-12-01 03:12:43

defears
Member
Registered: 2010-07-26
Posts: 218

Re: Huge load while moving files to FAT32 formatted phone

This setting got rid the unresponsiveness on 4 of my machines while copying to usb flash.
edit /etc/security/limits.conf

username - priority -2

and reboot.
This is the only thing that worked for me.

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