[arch-general] system slowing down when copying files.

[Uli Armbruster]

* Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi <vmlinuz386 at yahoo.com.ar> [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.