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

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Message-Id: <E1MpRVj-0000OA-G9@approx.mit.edu>
Date:	Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:51:47 -0400
From:	Sanjoy Mahajan <sanjoy@....EDU>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
CC:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
Subject: Re: Poor desktop responsiveness with background I/O-operations

Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.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
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