I/O Bound Procs Clobbering Responsiveness

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Jared K. Smith <jsmith at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 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.

I see the same thing with usb but I think I also see it when doing
disk to network transfers as well like for scp. My HDD is encrypted
which likely doesn't help perf but its not normally this bad. I've
been seeing it for a while, I can't say exactly when it started but
its possible or around when I upgraded from F-15 to F-16 beta.

Peter

Peter