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splakdatter
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:10 am    Post subject: heavy disk access ==> jerky mouse Reply with quote

Load openoffice and the mouse gets all jerky. In fact, anytime the hard disk is accessed in any significant way, the system become unresponsive.

What gives? I thot Linux was a multi-tasking OS? :)
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There are a couple of things you can try, one is set your hd parameters using hdparm the other is renice x.

These work for me:

Code:

renice -20 -p `ps -C X -o pid | tail -n 1`
hdparm -u 1 -c 1 -d 1 -m 32 -X 68 /dev/hda

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delta407
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, renicing X didn't seem to do much for me; it also dropped my glxgears framerate by about 4%. (Which is weird.)

Look into the thread entitled "my harddrive performance is sucking".
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That is weird.
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neuron
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

no it's not.. your setting another task higher than the program your running, which means the program will run slower.

instead of doing that dumb renice, nice emerge's or make's...


and hdparm will more than likely solve your problems, but be carefull when using it, it can screw your hd up..
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delta407
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I said it was weird because glxgears will talk to X which handles the actual drawing, and when X was given a higher priority the drawing speed decreased. And yes, renicing emerge is a better solution overall. (But that's off-topic...)

Anyway, please "emerge hdparm" and post the output of "hdparm -tT". This will indicate if your disk speed is a source of problems (which it likely is).
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Did all the hdparm stuff, set dma on, 32bit bullshit, etc.

Just seems that the kernel doesn't handle pre-emptive multi-tasking very well when IO is going wacko on the IDE bus. Gates has at least done that well.
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delta407
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 2:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

What's your disk throughput?

Also, what kernel are you using?
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Robert
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 3:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Did all the hdparm stuff, set dma on, 32bit bullshit, etc.


Yeah, but how is the actual performance? I have had similar issues before, but always was able to resolve them. One time it was my IDE controller. I run a pretty vanilla kernel with only the low latency patch and I get no audio dropouts. Not even compiling, running X, Win4Lin etc..

Whats the output from 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda3' (where hda3 is your home partition) ?

Heres mine:

# bash-2.05a# hdparm -tT /dev/hda3
# /dev/hda3:
# Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.45 seconds =284.44 MB/sec
# Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.60 seconds = 40.00 MB/sec


--
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delta407
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 3:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

And mine:

Code:
# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.70 seconds =183.12 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.59 seconds = 40.13 MB/sec


Also, how much RAM do you have versus how much RAM are you using? Use "free" or "top" to give you answers.
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splakdatter
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 3:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

disk is:
Code:
hda: MAXTOR 6L080J4, ATA DISK drive
hda: 156355584 sectors (80054 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=9732/255/63, UDMA(66)


hdparm settings:
Code:
 /dev/hda:
 multcount    = 16 (on)
 I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 nowerr       =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    =  8 (on)
 geometry     = 9732/255/63, sectors = 156355584, start = 0
 busstate     =  1 (on)
 acoustic     =  0 (128=quiet ... 254=fast)


hdparm -tT :
Code:
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.92 seconds =138.99 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.37 seconds = 26.98 MB/sec


uname -a:
Code:
Linux mymachine.mydomain.com 2.4.19-gentoo-r5 #5 Sun Jun 16 09:23:30 CDT 2002 i686 AuthenticAMD
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delta407
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 3:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

What filesystem?
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 3:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, that "at least Gates has done that right" comment was rather unnecessary. (Considering I've seen similar behavior on every Windows out there.)

Anyway...

What's your hardware configuration look like? Some UltraDMA IDE controllers seriously blow. Also, what's your X configuration like?

[edited out big blob here]

Can you give us a list of active processes (using either ps aux or top) when you're launching OpenOffice?
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 4:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Did you compile OO.org yourself and if so what were your flags during the compilation?
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2002 4:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also, did you compile the kernel with your specific chipset support?

When I set up my office machine for the first time, I had this problem. I did all the hdparm tricks, but it didn't seem to help much. What finally solved it was compiling the kernel to support dma and my specific chipset.

At home, I'm running scsi--a sure fix for ide slowness! :D

Jim
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