Rediculous amount of IO use when updating packages!

[Kavon Farvardin]

On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 18:49 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 16:21 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I wouldn't be too sure. The kernel parameter is related to write
> operations over the USB bus. Since SSD drives aren't connected via USB,
> I doubt it would have any effect.
> 
> The quickest check would be to see
> if /sys/block/<drive>/device/max_sectors exists for the SSD.
> 
> poc
> 

/sys/block/sda/device/ does not have a max_sectors :/