Re: Poor desktop responsiveness with background I/O-operations

Ulrich Lukas
2009-09-21T07:48:44Z

Hi and thanks for your reply!

Mike Galbraith wrote:
> nicing a shell or the dd should (and does) help a LOT.

If this is the only way to influence this, maybe the default settings
for the niceness of interactive and non-interactive tasks are not the
best choice. (Maybe a distribution problem in this case)

> reads are sync, more heavily affected by seek latency than writes.

But how does this explain the seconds-long delays?

If an interactive process causes a lot of seeks because of reads/writes
which "are sync", I see how this can greatly slow down otherwise
pipelined write operations, but the other way around?