From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:50:00 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:49:01 -0500 Received: from packet.digeo.com ([12.110.80.53]:56723 "EHLO packet.digeo.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:48:19 -0500 Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 10:59:36 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Maciej Soltysiak Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 2.5.65 interactivity Message-Id: <20030324105936.559a03d1.akpm@digeo.com> In-Reply-To: References: <20030322132551.75ff8ab8.akpm@digeo.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.9 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-OriginalArrivalTime: 24 Mar 2003 18:59:16.0149 (UTC) FILETIME=[777B5650:01C2F237] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Maciej Soltysiak wrote: > > > First thing we need to work out is whether it is a CPU scheduler thing > > or if it is a VM/MM/block/fs latency problem. > OK It is a VM/MM/block/latency problem. > > - How much memory do you have? > 128 MB Your machine is swapping and paging like crazy. Bits of your X server get paged out to disk and take ages to come back because the heavy write streams are starving reads from disk. > > - Try setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness to zero > i will try. > > > - Try decreasing /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio to 15 > will try that too. > These things should help - possibly the defaults are wrong. Also the anticipatory IO scheduler in -mm kernels might help reduce the disk read latency.