From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751448AbVHXElH (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:41:07 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751452AbVHXElH (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:41:07 -0400 Received: from wproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.184.200]:7281 "EHLO wproxy.gmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751448AbVHXElG (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:41:06 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:user-agent:x-accept-language:mime-version:to:subject:references:in-reply-to:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; b=uiED/NVB7o7RVp8NQTr6vMAVbfGVaDMG+VCKDM46DjrZ2nYXFzulAQ9dBJED7yCJLQlha4EnCNq2SHwALZb1CaqWHgk1Zwzi/WdNgDUPKE/NAOfbkGEg/vw1F5UbtzD3mGwMWuNPdtrWUY9zIYpVHMtk45giiEmmyb4n2pDO+ZE= Message-ID: <430BFA58.6090609@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:10:56 +0530 From: Rajesh User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (X11/20050716) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: debug a high load average References: <430B03B4.8040205@gmail.com> <20050823133050.GC29062@harddisk-recovery.com> In-Reply-To: <20050823133050.GC29062@harddisk-recovery.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Erik Mouw wrote: >On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 04:38:36PM +0530, Rajesh wrote: > > >>I have a case occasionally when I copy data from a usb storage (ipod) to >>my hard drive the load average goes up from 0.4 to about 15.0, and the >>system becomes very unusable till I kill the cp command. I have checked >>the CPU usage, bytes read from usb device, byte written to hard drive >>etc, and all these values are low like CPU usage is at a maximum of 30%, >>disk read bytes is at an average of 1.5 MiB/s, disk write bytes is at >>1.5 MiB/s, number of processes is at 110, etc, during this high load. >> >> > >1.5 MB/s suggests you're using an IDE drive in PIO mode. Switch to DMA >mode (hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda) and see if it gets any better. > > > It seems to have helped a little. Now the rate at which load average goes up has decreased ( I can copy up to about 700-800 MiB compared to a high of 200MiB earlier), but it is still going up to 15 gradually at which point I am still killing the cp process to make the system usable. I know I am not giving much information. But if I know what factors cause the loadavg to keep on going up I will gladly provide it. I am running 2.6.12 kernel on a laptop. I have an ipod attached to my USB 1.1 as a drive on which I am saving and retreiving large files(2-4GiB files). The transfer speed is slow, but I am fine with it, as long as the load average stays within bounds so that the machine is usable. (If I dual boot to windows and do the same operation, I am able to get the files copied over in a few minutes.). Can vfat be a factor? Thanks Rajesh >Erik > > >