[PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

justasug · 2019-03-16 17:23:39

My problem is that the whole operating system becomes very sluggish and unresponsive when I am copying files to an external hard drive. I tried copying both with a GUI file manager and using the cp program from a terminal emulator.
I am copying files from my hard drive (where Arch is installed on) to an external hard drive via USB 2.0. I am running Arch Linux with the "linux" kernel package from the official repository (version 5.0.2.arch1-1). Everything else is also updated.

Is this normal and something I just have to accept? I've had this problem for quite a while now, but ignored it until now.
I would post more information, but I don't know what else is relevant.

Edit:

I tried a different scheduler for my hard drive. With bfq instead of the default mq-deadline it seemed to work smoothly, but I haven't tested it extensively yet.

Last edited by justasug (2019-09-01 11:08:55)

seth · 2019-03-16 17:45:47

session type (GUI, DE, …), cpu load, involved filesystems, cross tests (copying from external drive to hdd, copying from/to tmps), there's at least one account of terrible IO performance on the 5.0 kernels, so try the lts kernel as well.

justasug · 2019-04-06 16:51:43

I am running an Openbox X session.
The CPU load is below 50% on an i5-520M.
I am copying from and to an EXT4 filesystem.
It's behaving the same whether I'm copying from the external hard drive or to the external hard drive.
Same result with the LTS kernel, in fact I've been experiencing this for the past years with way older kernels.
Here's a screenshot of the hard drive activity from iotop (sorry for the screenshot): https://i.postimg.cc/pyb892DW/2019-03-18-17-51-50.png

I just tried it on a computer that has an SSD and the desktop doesn't become less responsive. Perhaps it's time to ditch the "old" HDDs.

seth · 2019-04-06 20:11:35

"dmcrypt" - is either or both of the FS encrypted?
Also "CPU load is below 50%" is not a very accurate description and esp. if this is a multicore or SMP value, this could still imply one core to be fully loaded.

justasug · 2019-04-09 15:23:54

My OS's filesystem is encrypted, the drive where I'm copying to isn't.
Sorry about the unprecise CPU load. Overall it said 50%. Not even 1 core/thread is fully exhausted, the others are almost idle.

Is this kind of sluggishness to be expected from such a computer with full drive encryption? I am using dm-crypt with LUKS on a partition. Or in other words is it the encryption that's at fault and not the slow HDD?

seth · 2019-04-09 20:41:06

Is the SSD on the other system encrypted as well?
Can you take encryption out of the equation (eg. by copying from an unencrypted tempfs)?

Arch Linux

#1 2019-03-16 17:23:39

[PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

#2 2019-03-16 17:45:47

Re: [PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

#3 2019-04-06 16:51:43

Re: [PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

#4 2019-04-06 20:11:35

Re: [PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

#5 2019-04-09 15:23:54

Re: [PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

#6 2019-04-09 20:41:06

Re: [PARTLY SOLVED] Unresponsive when copying files

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