From: Sanjoy Mahajan <sanjoy@MIT.EDU>
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: Poor desktop responsiveness with background I/O-operations
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:51:47 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <E1MpRVj-0000OA-G9@approx.mit.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <dmnMy-8tg-7@gated-at.bofh.it>
Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:
> can you try the following two things?
>
> echo 4096 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests
> for i in `pidof kjournald` ; do ionice -c1 -p $i ; done
>
> to see if they help?
That helped here. The hardware is a Thinkpad T60 with 1.5GB RAM and
this hard drive:
ata1.00: ATA-7: Hitachi HTE541616J9SA00, SB4OC7KP, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
When the 'locate' daily cron job runs, or I run 'aptitude
dist-upgrade' (after all packages are downloaded), or I back up /home
to a USB hard drive using rsync, the desktop response badly degrades.
I'm not using a fancy desktop---just twm. An rxvt can take up to 10
seconds to start up, and I often see emacs repainting its window when it
comes to the foreground. Using your settings, rxvt takes about 1 second
to start up, which is a large improvement.
(The kernel is 2.6.30 with debian patches)
-Sanjoy
next parent reply other threads:[~2009-09-20 18:52 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <dmlhK-6ws-5@gated-at.bofh.it>
[not found] ` <dmnMy-8tg-7@gated-at.bofh.it>
2009-09-20 18:51 ` Sanjoy Mahajan [this message]
2009-09-20 3:08 Ulrich Lukas
2009-09-20 4:11 ` Thomas Fjellstrom
2009-09-20 6:07 ` Arjan van de Ven
2009-09-20 8:50 ` Ulrich Lukas
2009-09-20 17:17 ` Nikos Chantziaras
2009-09-20 19:38 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 0:22 ` Justin P. Mattock
2009-09-21 4:23 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 7:48 ` Ulrich Lukas
2009-09-21 8:06 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 19:47 ` James Cloos
2009-09-21 22:47 ` Nikos Chantziaras
2009-09-21 23:34 ` James Cloos
2009-09-22 7:06 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-22 9:20 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-22 11:22 ` Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
2009-09-22 11:32 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-22 16:58 ` James Cloos
2009-09-20 17:04 ` Ulrich Lukas
2009-09-20 20:22 ` Jiri Kosina
2009-09-20 22:04 ` Jan Kara
2009-09-21 7:25 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 7:33 ` Arjan van de Ven
2009-09-21 7:41 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 7:47 ` Mike Galbraith
2009-09-21 2:59 ` Ulrich Lukas
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