Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755583AbZITSwF (ORCPT ); Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:52:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755475AbZITSwB (ORCPT ); Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:52:01 -0400 Received: from BISCAYNE-ONE-STATION.MIT.EDU ([18.7.7.80]:63902 "EHLO biscayne-one-station.mit.edu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755319AbZITSwB (ORCPT ); Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:52:01 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org CC: Arjan van de Ven Subject: Re: Poor desktop responsiveness with background I/O-operations References: X-Mailer: MH-E 8.2; nmh 1.3; GNU Emacs 23.1.1 Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:51:47 -0400 From: Sanjoy Mahajan Message-Id: X-Spam-Flag: NO X-Spam-Score: 0.00 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1193 Lines: 32 Arjan van de Ven 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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/