System slows down during I/O

[cloudslayer]

Hi all,

I've noticed a strange problem during my upgrade from kubuntu 11.04 to 11.10.

I always prefer using a clean reinstall, which is quite easy as I have 2 hard disk drives in my laptop so I can move important stuff to the second disk. On both OSes (11.04 and 11.10), the PC slows down a *lot* while the copy is in progress, making the pointer jump around when I try to move it and making even simple tasks a pain...

So for the question: Is there a way to ensure less resources are used for these copy operations, ensuring a good-working interface gets priority?

[oshunluvr]

Re: System slows down during I/O

I would say there are several areas to look into: drive partition tables, file system choice, file system mount settings, and autonice daemon.

First I would optimize your hard drive and file systems, then look into the autonice daemon. I think you can force a lower priority to some tasks with it.

Likely the issue is one of RAM filling up and maybe swapping occurring. You should also look into reducing swappiness amd swap pressure, or if you have a lot of RAM, moving tmpfs to RAM.