| 1 |
On 12/02/2009 05:10 PM, Willie Wong wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 12:32:20PM +0100, Penguin Lover Jes??s Guerrero squawked: |
| 3 |
>> On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 13:22:38 +0200, Dirk Uys<dirkcuys@×××××.com> wrote: |
| 4 |
>>> This has been bothering me for some time now. I have a Dell PC at work, |
| 5 |
>>> Intel Core2 Duo with 4gb ram etc. Whenever something does a lot of disk |
| 6 |
>>> access, the PC slows down to a halt? |
| 7 |
> |
| 8 |
>>> The application that is mostly involved when I get |
| 9 |
>>> these long delays is FireFox, VMWare and emerge (emerge --sync). |
| 10 |
>> |
| 11 |
>> I know I am hitting at the obvious, but I can't be sure you already |
| 12 |
>> checked that. |
| 13 |
>> |
| 14 |
>> Since the applications you are using can be quite intensive in memory |
| 15 |
>> usage, did you check whether you are hitting swap or not? |
| 16 |
> |
| 17 |
> I realize that Firefox is a memory hog, but how many tabs must be open |
| 18 |
> for Swap to hit severely on a machine with 4gb ram? :) |
| 19 |
> |
| 20 |
> Question in general: emerge --sync and VMWare I can see, but why does |
| 21 |
> FireFox require heavy disk access? |
| 22 |
|
| 23 |
It does not require heavy disk access. It does however do frequent |
| 24 |
accesses. Due to the kernel problems with simultaneous disk I/O on |
| 25 |
desktop systems, apps freeze regardless of whether their disk access is |
| 26 |
"heavy" or not. The disk I/O code in the Linux kernel is probably |
| 27 |
written with servers in mind, not desktops, and you need to work around |
| 28 |
this with ionice, which I wrote about in another post. |
Archives