Re: Chronic resource starvation.

[Mike Mestnik <cheako@mikemestnik.net>]

On 01/15/12 06:08, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 14:21 -0600, Mike Mestnik wrote:
>> On 01/13/12 21:17, Mike Mestnik wrote:
>>> I've dealt with applications taking extended time off for a number of
>>> years.  I typically attribute it to applications being overly zealous
>>> about eating memory as most every application tends to do these days.  I
>>> had always figured that there a likely plenty of ppl complaining and I
>>> didn't want to get the boiler plat answer that resources are cheap.
>>>
>>> I refuse to buy into the idea that Z computers can get an additional Y
>>> resource to run application X, when instead application X could be
>>> engineered once and for all.  This ideology is not sustainable and
>>> eventually will crash upon it's self.  I call this Z * Y < X.  The
>>> application source becomes the single location where every computers
>>> resources can be increased at the cost of much less then to adjust the
>>> running environment of every location that the code may run.
>>>
>>> Here is a 84MB video that demonstrates the issue.
>>> http://j.mp/wavbCO
>>> http://bitly.com/wavbCO+
>> I'm glad to see a number of you have clicked on this link.
>>
>> Does this behavior look normal or is it just my system?  If it is normal
>> how difficult would it be to make corrections and would those
>> corrections likely be kernel or application related?
> That "Backup complete" makes me suspect a classic case of IO-itis.  If
> bits of your GUI were pushed out or ram (or weren't previously used),
> and live on a disk you're beating hell out of, you get to experience
> horrid interactivity while those missing bits are being retrieved.
Thank you for the reply!

That's DVDShrink, copies from optical drive(slow) to disk(fast-ish?).
http://www.dvdshrink.info/

That wouldn't explain why the monitor(gkrellm) stopped updating, every
part of that is pooling like top would.  Gkrellm indicates disk activity
and it shows the backup complete on sr1 and a backup in progress on sr0,
however neither of these operations rate on Disk or sda.

I wouldn't suspect that 16MB/s could saturate an HD disk, perhaps I can
buffer this better?

> 	-Mike
>