Rediculous amount of IO use when updating packages!

Mikkel L. Ellertson mikkel at infinity-ltd.com
Fri Sep 11 21:21:04 UTC 2009


Kavon Farvardin wrote:
> So I installed Fedora 11 recently on my ThinkPad R61, and had 560+
> packages to update. Installing and cleaning the packages has been taking
> FOREVER. Almost several hours, I've had to stop it so often (and restart
> it with yum-continue-transaction) because it lags my entire system. It's
> all IO use too, the CPU is barely being used!
> 
> I have installed a solid state drive in my laptop and it shouldn't be so
> slow at deleting or cleaning packages, it's doing one every 5 seconds or
> more. Is there some bug with SSDs and yum? (maybe python related as it
> seems yum is written in python?) I have no speed issues with anything
> else, and when I installed this drive it was a huge overall performance
> improvement over my 5400 RPM disk. I'm also using ext4 as it was the
> default, and I think a Logical Volume setup instead of a partition based
> one (again, default settings).
> 
> What should I do?
> 
There was a thread here from Patrick O'Callaghan that may help. It
was about USB flash drives, but it will probably apply to SSDs as well.

> Just a quick note to call people's attention to
> http://marc-abramowitz.com/archives/2007/02/17/getting-good-performance-out-of-usb-hard-drives-in-linux/.
> This is a couple of years old but it worked like a charm for me.
> 
> Briefly, there's a kernel parameter
> called /sys/block/sd[a,b,...]/device/max_sectors (for USB drives sda,
> sdb etc.). This specifies the maximum size of a disk I/O operation for
> USB storage devices in units of 512 bytes, the default value being 240,
> i.e. 120KB (see http://www.linux-usb.org/FAQ.html#i5). The max_sectors
> value can be changed doing "echo N > ..." as root, and can have a
> dramatic effect on write performance for USB devices such as pendrives.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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