System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Konstantin Svist]

  On 09/14/2010 02:35 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Konstantin Svist<fry.kun at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>   On 09/14/2010 02:21 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Konstantin Svist<fry.kun at gmail.com>    wrote:
>>>>    For some reason, while running HDD-intensive tasks (e.g. svn update on
>>>> a large tree), system becomes extremely unresponsive.
>>>> And I don't mean tasks that require any disk access - I'm trying to type
>>>> inside an ssh session in a terminal, and the remote machine is getting
>>>> my keystrokes after a pretty long delay.
>>>>
>>>> Just now, composing this email, thunderbird got stuck at the previous
>>>> sentence for a second while it was downloading new messages.
>>>>
>>>> What's going on??
>>> Supposedly there are kernel scheduler fixes in to fix that problem.
>>>
>>> For now, try to reduce your swapping. Are you using RAID?
>>>
>> No, I'm on a laptop with 1 drive and I'm not using swap at all (because
>> all my programs fit just fine in the 2GB of physical RAM)
> Does `free` agree with your lack of swap use? Either way, slow IO
> currently adversely affects GUI performance. There are supposedly
> fixes on the way to try to resolve that.
>

Is the space pope reptilian?

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2061108    1374032     687076          0     214380     484316
-/+ buffers/cache:     675336    1385772
Swap:            0          0          0


Guess I have no choice but to wait for those fixes, like everyone else.
Though if there any hacks that alleviate the problem, I'd like to know