System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Konstantin Svist <fry.kun at gmail.com> wrote:
>  On 09/14/2010 02:21 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Konstantin Svist<fry.kun at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>   For some reason, while running HDD-intensive tasks (e.g. svn update on
>>> a large tree), system becomes extremely unresponsive.
>>> And I don't mean tasks that require any disk access - I'm trying to type
>>> inside an ssh session in a terminal, and the remote machine is getting
>>> my keystrokes after a pretty long delay.
>>>
>>> Just now, composing this email, thunderbird got stuck at the previous
>>> sentence for a second while it was downloading new messages.
>>>
>>> What's going on??
>> Supposedly there are kernel scheduler fixes in to fix that problem.
>>
>> For now, try to reduce your swapping. Are you using RAID?
>>
>
> No, I'm on a laptop with 1 drive and I'm not using swap at all (because
> all my programs fit just fine in the 2GB of physical RAM)

Does `free` agree with your lack of swap use? Either way, slow IO
currently adversely affects GUI performance. There are supposedly
fixes on the way to try to resolve that.

-- 
Fedora 13
(www.pembo13.com)