On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 06:24:49PM +0200, Penguin Lover Nikos Chantziaras squawked: >> Hum, I had forgotten about this command. It would have come in handy a >> few days ago. But in the case of FireFox, wouldn't that make it worse? > > No. If you run other tasks as "ionice -c3" they will stop blocking > Firefox.
I see. I guess it would not have helped in my case as it was, since the problem was due to another user's process blocking the IO, and I am not root on my work machine. > >> Also, what do you mean by known problem? What sort of set-up causes >> the problem? Is this related at all to the hardware used? Or is this >> purely in software? > > No, it's related to the Linux kernel blocking other applications for too > long when one of them does heavy I/O. This is done so that each task has a > chance to get more work done for the amount of time it gets to do I/O. As > you can imagine, this hurts non-server systems quite badly. Ah, so ionice -c 3 is to be used for the other (dare I say non-interactive?) processes. Thanks for the explanation. Cheers, W -- A young woman was jogging when she saw a wizened old man, smiling at her from his porch. "You look so happy!" she said to him. "What's your secret for a long satisfying life?" "Well, I smoke three packs of cigarettes every day and I drink a case of wisky every week. on top of that I never excersice, and I eat lots of fatty foods." "That's amazing," the woman said. "And how old are you?" He answered, "thirty two." Sortir en Pantoufles: up 1090 days, 18:04
