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

Nikos Chantziaras
2009-09-21T22:47:21Z

On 09/21/2009 10:47 PM, James Cloos wrote:
>[...]
> I had that kernel up for soemthing like five weeks, on a busy, low-ram
> laptop, w/o and long pauses or other noticeable pain. For at least two
> years before that the best this laptop could manage before latency
> became horrific was a fortnight, and weekly reboots were desirable.
>
> Unfortunately, before I could send out a congratulatory note (I wanted
> to first confirm that the result remained) I pulled up and started see-
> ing even worse latency then ever.
>[...]
> A git pull on a clone of Linus' tree is a great way to trigger the
> problem. As is using Gentoo's portage to install/upgrade anything.
> (Bad python; no alligator!¹)

Fortunately, this is completely (at least here) solved by putting those
in make.conf:

PORTAGE_NICENESS=19
PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="ionice -c 3 -p \${PID}"