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

[Maciej Grela]

2010/11/26 Stroller <stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk>:
> 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?
>

I use ionice & nice when running paludis in the background and it does
the job pretty well:

alias paludis='ionice -c 3 nice -n 19 paludis'

Just remember that for ionice to work properly you need to have the
CFQ I/O scheduler enabled.

Best regards,
Maciej Grela