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

Sanjoy Mahajan
2009-09-20T18:52:05Z

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