Arch Linux

peabrain

Member

Registered: 2005-08-08

Posts: 42

High CPU during disk input

Not always, but too often, I find that, when writing do disk, the CPU load goes up (one core at about 30-40% and the other at about 70-80%) and everything else slows down. For example when copying a large file (or a large number of smaller files) from ext3 to another ext3, swithing tabs in Firefox and switching desktops in X is slow, and there's occasional lagging while typing with the keyboard.

iotop says both the read and write speed alter between 1-20 M/s.

I've tried different scheduler's (currently deadline) to no avail.

I've got a C2D E7200, 4 GB ram and two SATA disks, the system is upgraded and I'm using Arch Stock kernel. Could this be a chipset thing? How do I figure out if the system is using the appropriate driver and not some slow generic driver?

Or what could cause this?

Edit: Well I forgot to mention that I'm using Arch64.

And moments after I posted this thread I began to find discussions which tell me this is perfectly normal behavior with 64 bit kernel. Sigh...

Last edited by peabrain (2009-10-04 00:05:09)