Subject: Re: sluggish system responsiveness under higher IO load
From: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
To: Matthias Dahl <mlkernel@mortal-soul.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <200609241632.11126.mlkernel@mortal-soul.de>
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	 <20060915181709.GA15333@kernel.dk>
	 <200609241632.11126.mlkernel@mortal-soul.de>
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Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:27:17 +0000
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On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 16:32 +0200, Matthias Dahl wrote:
> On Friday 15 September 2006 20:17, Jens Axboe wrote:
> 
> > Sounds like a hardware issue, someone could be hogging the bus. You
> > could try and play with the pci latency setting.
> 
> Is there a way I can debug this...? I really would like to get to the bottom 
> of this somehow. I did one more test: installed and started enemy territory 
> because it's free and heavily uses OpenGL... works fine so far. But simply 
> starting an untar process in the background while et is running causes quite 
> distorted sound and even the mouse pointer won't react in time anymore until 
> the untar process is finished. This can't be right. IO load shouldn't cause 
> sluggish responsiveness...

It depends a lot on how the application is written.  Start your app at
nice -10, and retry the IO interference test.

	-Mike

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