Re: 2.6.36 io bring the system to its knees

[Jesper Juhl <jj@chaosbits.net>]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Chris Mason wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 03:30:36PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > "Many seconds freezes" and slowdowns wont be fixed via the VFS scalability patches 
> > i'm afraid.
> > 
> > This has the appearance of some really bad IO or VM latency problem. Unfixed and 
> > present in stable kernel versions going from years ago all the way to v2.6.36.
> 
> Hmmm, the workload you're describing here has two special parts.  First
> it dramatically overloads the disk, and then it has guis doing things
> waiting for the disk.
> 

Just want to chime in with a 'me too'.

I see something similar on Arch Linux when doing 'pacman -Syyuv' and there 
are many (as in more than 5-10) updates to apply. While the update is 
running (even if that's all the system is doing) system responsiveness is 
terrible - just starting 'chromium' which is usually instant (at least 
less than 2 sec at worst) can take upwards of 10 seconds and the mouse 
cursor in X starts to jump a bit as well and switching virtual desktops 
noticably lags when redrawing the new desktop if there's a full screen app 
like gimp or OpenOffice open there. This is on a Lenovo Thinkpad R61i 
which has a 'Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz' CPU, 2GB of 
memory and 499996 kilobytes of swap.


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