Arch Linux

peabrain

Member

Registered: 2005-08-08

Posts: 42

Sluggish performance during disk operations

I've got a PC with a SATA hard disk and Arch is installed into a partition which uses the Ext3FS. During any longer disk operations the performance degrades near to a level of unusability. The movement of the mouse pointer is very choppy, switching between windows or desktops takes several seconds and so on... It's of course understandable that this would happen if I tried to access the disk with some program while the operation active, but this happens even if I'm trying to access something that is loaded into the RAM. And all the time most of the RAM remains free.

This doesn't happen while doing similar things in Windows, so I guess I must have just configured my kernel badly or something. Any advice on where to start solving this?

[vEX]

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-11-23

Posts: 450

Re: Sluggish performance during disk operations

I think you're missing DMA, either to have built into the kernel or it's built in and your HDD is not using it. You should enable the following options, as well as your motherboards chipset:

Generic PCI bus-master DMA support: CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA
Use DMA by default when available: CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO

---

PC: Antec P182B | Asus P8Z77-V PRO | Intel i5 3570k | 16GB DDR3 | GeForce 450GTS | 4TB HDD | Pioneer BDR-207D | Asus Xonar DX | Altec Lansing CS21 | Eizo EV2736W-BK | Arch Linux x86_64
HTPC: Antec NSK2480 | ASUS M3A78-EM (AMD 780G) | AMD Athlon X3 425 | 8GB DDR2 | GeForce G210 | 2TB HDD | Arch Linux x86_64
Server: Raspberry Pi (model B) | 512MB RAM | 750GB HDD | Arch Linux ARM

peabrain

Member

Registered: 2005-08-08

Posts: 42

Re: Sluggish performance during disk operations

Thanks for your reply.

I've enabled the correct chipset while customizing kernel (Intel ICH6, without which Arch won't even boot, so it should be correct). I've also enabled DMA, but from certain locations I've understood that DMA is only for IDE devices and doesn't affect SATA performance.

I did some poking on some other forums and found out that this problem has been pestering other people too, but no solution has been found (at least I don't know of any).

smurnjiff

Member

Registered: 2007-06-25

Posts: 211

Re: Sluggish performance during disk operations

Make sure your hostname is correct.

#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#<ip-address>    <hostname.domain.org>    <hostname>
127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain    localhost

# End of file

Is the computer sluggish when X is not running?

silencer

Member

From: Buenos Aires / Argentina

Registered: 2006-09-01

Posts: 102

Website

Re: Sluggish performance during disk operations

I have the same problem here using the 2.6.21-ARCH Kernel from the repository with an IDE hard disk. I always wondered why this happens

Last edited by silencer (2007-07-02 03:23:29)

Cotton

Member

From: Cornwall, UK

Registered: 2004-09-17

Posts: 568

Re: Sluggish performance during disk operations

Do you get the same symptoms if you boot with another kernel, eg viper.