[gentoo-user] Best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk activity?

[Stroller]

Hi there,

As per subject, what's the best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk activity, please?

Or perhaps a better question would be: what approaches are available?

Presently my main Linux system is basically just a storage server with a *really slow* disk controller. I do all my web-browsing and email (and most other things) on my Mac laptop (because my Mac desktop has recently died ☹), but I occasionally do some bash or perl scripting, searches and other stuff on this Linux box.

Normally this isn't a problem - the machine is an old Pentium 4 but plenty powerful enough for this simple command-line stuff. However I have recently bought a new STB which plays DVD .iso files across the network, so I started ripping DVDs on storage server, using dvdbackup && mkisofs. When I do so, interactivity becomes *dire* - it takes maybe 15 seconds for *any* command to execute.

My immediate reaction was to consider the recent "200-line patch to kernel => superkernel" thread:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/user/221770

But I have also heard of `ionice` in the past: http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice

I've never used that - in fact, I can't recall ever having to use the regular `nice` - but I think maybe I should consider it.

Does anyone have any thoughts, please?

Stroller.