I/O Bound Procs Clobbering Responsiveness

[Jared K. Smith]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R
<caf at omen.com> wrote:
> This a subjective comment, but it seems that I/O bound procs
> such as disk copy are seriously impacting GUI response more
> than before.

I noticed the same thing yesterday while trying to create a live usb
key using livecd-iso-to-disk, only it only seemed to be impacting
certain GUIs.  While creating the key, firefox was completely
unresponsive.  Gnome terminal seemed to work just fine.  Accessing the
GNOME dash (either by pressing the meta key or moving the mouse to the
hot corner) was unresponsive, but I could press CTRL-ALT-down to get
to the second virtual desktop.

In my quick tests in the airport this morning, the issue appears to be
related to USB I/O (at least on my machine), as I can't reproduce the
problem copying data from one SATA disk to another (using a SATA disk
in the CD-ROM bay).  I'll try to do some more testing once I get back
home.

--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project Leader