Sporadic lag -- really annoying [Solved]

[grooveman]

Hi.

I'm having a really irritating problem with my PC. Every few minutes (or sometimes several times a minute), my system will become unresponsive. Nothing registers, no mouse clicks, keystrokes -- nothing, then all of a sudden, the system will become responsive again, and all my clicks and keystrokes spit out all at once.

This is a new system, and it is no wuss. It is a quad-core amd with 8GB of ram. I'm using KDE 4 as my desktop, and I have an NVidia geforce 9800 -- so the compositing should not be a burden at all.

I appreciate any help!

Thanks.

G
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[Rexilion]

If I were you, I would:

- Try the nv driver for your card (completely disable nvidia (including opengl, kernel module etc...))
- Upgrade to a newer kernel (you have very recent hardware)
- Disable USB (I see a lot of those messages in your dmesg, this could *help* narrow down the problem)
- Try disabling cpu frequency schaling and any other power management related service (except for ACPI of course)

Hope that helps...

[grooveman]

Yeah, I think those are good tips... that nvidia driver seems very suspect to me in particular I'll give that a shot in the next day or two here...

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, I am running a raid 1 through mdadm/lvm2 -- thought I would think that should not make a difference...
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To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

[Rexilion]

[transpetaflops]

You wouldn't happen to have a Western Digital Green Power disk in that computer, would you? The Intelli-Park "feature" of that model is wrecking havoc in Linux-land unfortunately creating the exact behaviour you describe.

[grooveman]

[depontius]

Is this by anychance when Firefox is active? Does it happen when Firefox isn't active? I presume your /home is local ext3... What are your mount options? Did you accept the standard kernel options for building ext3?

I have /home mounted over nfs4, and used to have a bad case of this. I moved ~/.mozilla onto local disk and things got better, but I know that there have also been a lot of complaints about firefox/sqlite/ext3 interactions.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[transpetaflops]

[grooveman]

[grooveman]

[transpetaflops]

Yes, unfortunately this confirms you suffer from the Intellipark issue. 35,000 load/unload cycles in 5 weeks means you will have passed the rated 300,000 in less than a year. The drive will of course continue to work after that but WD takes no responsibility for it. If your drives are that new they probably won't allow you to disable the feature. WD revoked their utility some time ago claiming it would hurt to use it on drives it wasn't designed for. I have seen some user script writing to the drives every 5 seconds to circumvent the problem but that's an ugly hack in my opinion. I have two WD15EADS used as paperweights on my desk right now. One of them counted 216,000 load cycles during the 8 month they were used and I can never trust them with data again. I experienced the exact same lag as you describe and it took me several months to track down but when I finally got on the right track it was actually possible to hear the heads park if I listened carefully. I replaced the drives with cheap Samsungs and the problem disappeared.

EDIT: I noticed now that your drive has only been active 431 hours, that's 2.5 weeks so at that rate you'll pass 300,000 cycles in 5 months.

[grooveman]

Ugh...

Soo... what drives can a Linux guy buy now days?? Everything at 1TB+ seems to have this technology, be they made by WD or someone else! Which drives are safe?? Only samsung, or only certain samsungs?

BTW... I did find a copy of wdidle3, and I tried setting ti to 25500 and I tried disabling it. It didn't seem to change a thing. So........ Either my problem lies eslewhere, or the drives ignore the setting (because using wdidle3 after a reboot does show them to be where I set them).
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To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

[grooveman]

Okay....

As a test, I have moved my system to an old sata WD 80GB caviar disk.... and lo and behold... the problems have abated.

*sigh*

So, I blew $250 on useless drives. Now, what the heck do I buy that I can put into software raid? Cash is tight right now, so I do not want a repeat experience.

Anything here a good drive for a linux system in a RAID 1 mdadm/lvm2 solution?

Thanks so much, especially to you, transpetaflops, for your help thus far.

-G
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To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

[transpetaflops]

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but glad I could help you identify the problem. I've gone through incidents on every major brand of harddrives. In general the enterprise models don't have these "features" but they are usually way to expensive for regular users. I'm trying Samsung's Ecogreen F2 right now. The power management functions can be completely disabled on them with hdparm -B 255 (this doesn't work on WD). AFAIK, WD are the only ones that actually offloads the heads this way to save power so you should probably be fine with any other brand or another WD model that lacks Intellipark.

[transpetaflops]

For future reference, here's also a link to Qnap's info about this: http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=182&t=22363

[Monkeh]

As far as I know, only WD's Green series drives do the head parking in that manner. Any other WD drive should be fine. And a hell of a lot faster.

[grooveman]