Re: Why is deleting (or reading) files not counted as IO-Wait in top?

[Maxim Levitsky <maximlevitsky@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, 2 January 2008 21:35:03 Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 
> Currently i'm deleting about 500.000 files on a XFS-filesystem which 
> takes a few minutes, as i had a top open i saw that 'wa' is shown as 
> 0.0% (Nothing else running currently) and everything except 'id' is near 
> the bottom too. Kernel is 2.6.23.11.
> 
> So, as 'rm -rf' is essentially a IO (or seek, to be more correct)-bound 
> task, shouldn't that count as "Waiting for IO"?
> 
> The man-page of top says:
> 'Amount of time the CPU has been waiting for I/O to complete.'
> 
> But AFAICT wa only seams to be (ac)counted for writing and not for 
> reading. I come to that conclusion because, when i fire 'sync' i can see 
> some percent wa for a few seconds.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bis denn
> 


The IOWAIT time is the IDLE time that was spent waiting
for I/O. (meaning that there were no tasks running, but some were waiting on I/O)

Thus if you have another task that is not I/O bound, it can run in that time,
and ideally, you shouldn't notice any I/O slowdown, but the iowait time will decrease.

It wasn't the case before CFS introduction. I did few tests that showed almost 50% slowdown 
when running another task in that iowait time.
It is not longer a problem with CFS.


Regards,
	Maxim Levitsky