slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Michael Favia]

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Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On my IBM X31 laptop, the system entirely locks up when there's a lot of
> disk access, some common situations are:
>  - when getting heavily into swap due to a runaway process
>  - when running rpm/yum
> 
> It's not *technically* locked up (i.e. if you wait long enough it will
> come back) but in practice you have to reboot if a process has a memory
> leak, and you can't do any work while running yum.

It is amazing what we are completely content putting up with until
someone mentions they suffer from the same plight. I really like the
idea of being able to launch "System Monitor" aka gnome-system-monitor
(via hotkey) to graphically kill any runaway processes (or even just
advise me as to which one is the culprit so i can make an informed
decision). I don't know how to "force reserve" the resources to make it
functional in such a situation but it would save tons of unfinished work
(multitasking) that is being lost because of 1 wayward app.

- --
Michael Favia            michael.favia at insitesinc.com
Insites Incorporated    http://michael.insitesinc.com
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