On 27 August 2011 12:34, Madhurya Kakati wrote:

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Loui Chang wrote:

...

On Sat 27 Aug 2011 09:12 +0530, Madhurya Kakati wrote:

...

Hi, My system tends to slow down a lot when I copy files to and from a pen drive or even from one hard disk to another. Even my mouse cursor slows down. The system becomes almost unusable. I more than enough RAM and I am using a tiling window manager. So I am not even using a lot of RAM. Why is this happening? I can't work on my system if I run any large file copy/move operation. Please help. Thanks.

Your hard drive might be dying. Back up your files now.

Seriously? This doesn't happen in Windows 7. Also when I copy files from my new HDD to a pendrive my system still slows down. The new HDD is less than a month old.

This is a scheduler bottleneck, and AFAICR, a Linux deficiency that Con Kolivas trie(s|d) to improve with the BFS. From personal experience, BFS was much, much better, to the point that there was no noticeable slow-down. -- GPG/PGP ID: 8AADBB10

Thanks a lot for the tip. Unfortunately, BFQ isn't available yet in linux 3.0, so noop seems to be the only option for now. On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 04:11:56 -0300, Jari Vetoniemi wrote:

BFQ

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Jesse Jaara wrote:

Linux-ck and -pf from aur have it

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Linux-ck&diff=prev&oldid=153833

* Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi [27.08.2011 09:12]:

On 08/27/2011 12:42 AM, Madhurya Kakati wrote:

...

Hi, My system tends to slow down a lot when I copy files to and from a pen drive or even from one hard disk to another. Even my mouse cursor slows down. The system becomes almost unusable. I more than enough RAM and I am using a tiling window manager. So I am not even using a lot of RAM. Why is this happening? I can't work on my system if I run any large file copy/move operation. Please help. Thanks.

If you have 1GiB or more of RAM, one cause in recent kernels can be transparent hugepages. Disable it from boot with transparent_hugepage=never on kernel cmd param. Maybe this is fixed in newer 3.0, I do not know, I still have disable, some day I will test again if was improved.

This happens on my machine as well. The reason is, that the kernel swaps much more with linux 3.0 than 2.6.39. It moves programs into swap to get more space in ram for cache, which imo is a really stupid idea. This happens with cfs and bfs here.

* Qadri [28.08.2011 01:13]:

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Uli Armbruster < uli.armbruster@googlemail.com> wrote:

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This happens on my machine as well. The reason is, that the kernel swaps much more with linux 3.0 than 2.6.39. It moves programs into swap to get more space in ram for cache, which imo is a really stupid idea. This happens with cfs and bfs here.

If this is the case, it should be amended by setting the swappiness to a lower value, no? A simple `echo "20" > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness` would help. In lieu of a debate, just look at the discussion at [1].

MAQ.

[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

Sure, the problem can be corrected a little bit with setting the swappiness to another level. In the kernels before 3.0 I used swappiness=100 and it was VERY nice, now this setting is unusable, the kernel swaps WAY to much. The behavior with the default setting also changed. That's why I mentioned it here, I'm pretty sure that's the problem the op has.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi wrote:

On 08/27/2011 12:42 AM, Madhurya Kakati wrote:

...

Hi, My system tends to slow down a lot when I copy files to and from a pen drive or even from one hard disk to another. Even my mouse cursor slows down. The system becomes almost unusable. I more than enough RAM and I am using a tiling window manager. So I am not even using a lot of RAM. Why is this happening? I can't work on my system if I run any large file copy/move operation. Please help. Thanks.

If you have 1GiB or more of RAM, one cause in recent kernels can be transparent hugepages. Disable it from boot with transparent_hugepage=never on kernel cmd param. Maybe this is fixed in newer 3.0, I do not know, I still have disable, some day I will test again if was improved.

-- Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi \cos^2\alpha + \sin^2\alpha = 1

will transparent_hugepage=madvise be saner so that apps that do benefits from transparent hugepages and explicitly asked for it can have this feature available? unfortunately, i have no idea whether cp and mv are using these features. ;-) best regards,