Arch Linux

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: iozone to evaluate I/O schedulers... results NOT what you'd expect!

when your disk is extremely busy, and you're using CFQ, your desktop will become unresponsive. This doesn't happen with any other IO scheduler.

In which case the sensible choice with BFS is BFQ, so ionice is usable.

Of course, there's ionice, but AFAIK no way to automate it in a nice way.

It's not exactly difficult to set up. E.g. in ~/.bashrc

alias audacious="ionice -c2 /usr/bin/audacious"
alias transmission="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/transmission-gtk"
alias pidgin="nice /usr/bin/pidgin"
alias liferea="ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/liferea"
alias skype="nice /usr/bin/skype"
alias ekiga="nice /usr/bin/ekiga"
alias xchat="ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/xchat"
alias dropboxd="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/dropboxd"
alias gtk-gnutella="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/gtk-gnutella"
alias hp-systray="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/hp-systray"
alias verynice="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e"
alias mplayer="ionice -c2 nice -n -3 /usr/bin/mplayer"
alias psnice="ps -eo pid,tid,pri,nice,comm"

And in a desktop startup script:

ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e transmission-gtk -m &
nice /usr/bin/skype &
nice /usr/bin/pidgin &
ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/liferea &

With security limits set up for your user.

Using this method, you have to start such progs from the command-line rather than desktop entries - but again, hardly difficult.

You don't have to set up the niceness of every program - just the ones that realistically matter, to be either background (e.g. bittorrent client) or foreground (e.g. a game).

Fackamato

Member

Registered: 2006-03-31

Posts: 579

Re: iozone to evaluate I/O schedulers... results NOT what you'd expect!

when your disk is extremely busy, and you're using CFQ, your desktop will become unresponsive. This doesn't happen with any other IO scheduler.

In which case the sensible choice with BFS is BFQ, so ionice is usable.

Of course, there's ionice, but AFAIK no way to automate it in a nice way.

It's not exactly difficult to set up. E.g. in ~/.bashrc

alias audacious="ionice -c2 /usr/bin/audacious"
alias transmission="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/transmission-gtk"
alias pidgin="nice /usr/bin/pidgin"
alias liferea="ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/liferea"
alias skype="nice /usr/bin/skype"
alias ekiga="nice /usr/bin/ekiga"
alias xchat="ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/xchat"
alias dropboxd="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/dropboxd"
alias gtk-gnutella="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/gtk-gnutella"
alias hp-systray="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e /usr/bin/hp-systray"
alias verynice="ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e"
alias mplayer="ionice -c2 nice -n -3 /usr/bin/mplayer"
alias psnice="ps -eo pid,tid,pri,nice,comm"

And in a desktop startup script:

ionice -c3 schedtool -D -e transmission-gtk -m &
nice /usr/bin/skype &
nice /usr/bin/pidgin &
ionice -c3 nice /usr/bin/liferea &

With security limits set up for your user.

Using this method, you have to start such progs from the command-line rather than desktop entries - but again, hardly difficult.

You don't have to set up the niceness of every program - just the ones that realistically matter, to be either background (e.g. bittorrent client) or foreground (e.g. a game).

I know.

I was thinking of patching the verynice daemon to do it.