Heavy IO on 2nd disk -> complete system crawls

sidamos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 129

HI!

I have 2 hard disks:
hda: several system partitions and work partition (all ext3) and swap partition
hdb: one "multimedia" partition (xfs)

When there is heavy IO (dvdauthor or mplex) on hdb, the complete system is pretty unresponsive, despite the fact that I start that process with nice and ionice -c3.

I already tried 2 different IO schedulers (cfq and anticipatory), but with no real difference. IMHO, this should not matter anyway, because the heavy IO is all on hdb, so any access to hda should be unaffected.

The system has a dual-core AMD 5400+ and 2 GB RAM. DMA is enabled to both disks. The system is up-to-date. Using desktop profile.

Any hints/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Thomas

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 6609

Sounds like AMD64 system slow/unresponsive during disk access

Solution: Reinstall as 32-bit. Yes, that was sarcasm

sidamos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 129

I am running the system with 32 bit.

sidamos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 129

Thanks for the link. I added a response to that thread.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 6609

Well, you got the link wrong. Try clicking on your link. Note the full-stop "." at the end, which is invalid.

sidamos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 129

Thanks!