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TheOtherShoe
n00b
Joined: 12 Oct 2003
Posts: 47
Location: Portland, OR
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 Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:07 pm Post subject: System locks up during heavy hard drive use |
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Periodically when I am using my computer the hard drive starts working really hard and simultaneously the user interface slows to a snail's pace. Sometimes it gets so bad that I can barely move the mouse. Running gkrellm2 during one of these periods reveals that the hard drive access is taking place almost exclusively on my swap partition, memory is mostly full and cpu load is under 5%.
I am using a one year old laptop at 1.6 Ghz, 256 MB ram with a 30GB hard drive that is divided into 4 partitions; 1 ext3 (boot), 2 ReiserFS and 1 swap (500 MB). I don't know the speed of the hard drive, but below is the output from hdparm -tT /dev/hda when it is not working too hard:
| Code: | /dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1076 MB in 2.00 seconds = 537.54 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 50 MB in 3.67 seconds = 13.61 MB/sec |
I would like to know if there is anything I can do to keep things running smoothly. I know that 256 MB of ram is not very much, would upgrading make a huge improvement or would I just notice slowdowns less frequently? I would also greatly appreciate any suggestions that don't involve upgrading hardware since I have no money.
Some more information:
I am running kernel 2.6.2_rc-love1, but I was having the same issues with 2.6.1-gentoo. Also, I only notice these problems when using X, but they do not seem to be isolated to any particular window manager; I get similar results with Gnome, KDE and fluxbox.
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54799
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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TheOtherShoe,
Use hdparm -i /dev/hda to check for DMA. You will get better performace if its in use.
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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TheOtherShoe
n00b
Joined: 12 Oct 2003
Posts: 47
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 1:09 am Post subject: |
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It has using_dma set as on. Here is the output from hdparm -i /dev/hda :
| Code: | /dev/hda:
Model=IC25N030ATCS04-0, FwRev=CA3OA71A, SerialNo=CSH309DJCE22ZB
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1768kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=58605120
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: mode=0x80 (128) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-5 T13 1321D revision 3:
* signifies the current active mode
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I've also tried some perfomance tweaking switches for hdparm that I found in another thread, but I didn't see any difference in hdparm -tT
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