Thanks to all who replied. To answer some questions, it is a spinning hard drive, and here's mount information:
/dev/disk/by-uuid/e3631277-c4d0-460e-a2a3-6de16013e050 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,barrier=1,data=ordered) and there was plenty of free RAM as usual (the machine has 24 GB RAM), so that I don't think Firefox was swapped out. But since Firefox often does disk accesses (due to background tabs or whatever), it can freeze easily. The "tar" command wasn't running as root. And I don't have other information as I can't reproduce the problem with the same command (and "tar" is much faster now), though I'm now accessing the machine remotely (Firefox is no longer running...). Now... On 2013-02-28 16:50:32 +0000, Darac Marjal wrote: > On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:38:23AM -0500, m...@neidorff.com wrote: > > > Is it normal that when using the "tar" command to create a big archive, > > > the whole machine becomes unresponsive, e.g. several dozens of seconds > > > to do some operation (e.g. starting an xterm, or making Firefox react)? > > > > > > htop shows that there is still plenty of memory and atop shows nothing > > > special, except 100% disk busy of course. > > > > Yes. You may want to change the "nice" level of the tar command so that > > it doesn't take up so much disk time. > > "nice tar" won't actually change how heavily tar uses the disk. Instead > try "ionice -c3 tar" (or "nice ionice -c3 tar" if you want it to use > less[*] CPU /and/ disk). Thanks, I didn't know ionice. It might be useful next time I have a similar problem. But isn't it possible to lower the priority automatically (without an additional command like ionice) when a process takes all the I/O resources. Perhaps this isn't clear, but what I mean is that a process shouldn't take constantly all the resources for itself. I expect the resources to be more or less equitably shared (which is not what best-effort does, as described in the ionice(1) man page). -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130228182237.ga18...@xvii.vinc17.org