On 12/02/2009 05:10 PM, Willie Wong wrote:
On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 12:32:20PM +0100, Penguin Lover Jes??s Guerrero
squawked:
On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 13:22:38 +0200, Dirk Uys<dirkc...@gmail.com> wrote:
This has been bothering me for some time now. I have a Dell PC at work,
Intel Core2 Duo with 4gb ram etc. Whenever something does a lot of disk
access, the PC slows down to a halt?
The application that is mostly involved when I get
these long delays is FireFox, VMWare and emerge (emerge --sync).
I know I am hitting at the obvious, but I can't be sure you already
checked that.
Since the applications you are using can be quite intensive in memory
usage, did you check whether you are hitting swap or not?
I realize that Firefox is a memory hog, but how many tabs must be open
for Swap to hit severely on a machine with 4gb ram? :)
Question in general: emerge --sync and VMWare I can see, but why does
FireFox require heavy disk access?
It does not require heavy disk access. It does however do frequent
accesses. Due to the kernel problems with simultaneous disk I/O on
desktop systems, apps freeze regardless of whether their disk access is
"heavy" or not. The disk I/O code in the Linux kernel is probably
written with servers in mind, not desktops, and you need to work around
this with ionice, which I wrote about in another post.
