AMD64 system slow/unresponsive during disk access...

cz0 · Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2006 6:36 pm Post subject:

Oh! You gays fritend me!.. But good news. I'm not having any of explaned problems.
Here is my conf:
AMD 64 x2 4600+, ASUS A8N32-SLI, 512 + 512 MB Corsair, ASUS 7900GT Top, Seagate SATA 120G firs g. and 2 workin DVDs on PATA.
GCC 4.1.1, xorg 7.1, vanilla-sources 2.6.17, glibc 2.4-r3, KDE 3.5.4, nvidia-drivers 8774, SMP on.
So, having KDE started, I'm coping 2.4G iso image from vfat partition to ext3 and I have 7 - 10% usage for one core and 0 - 1% for enother and less then 12% tatal.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

bexamous · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 17

Just wanted to chime in and say I've noticed the same issue. hdparm performance is good but system starts to lag with lots of disk access. I went out and bought another GB of RAM so I could get rid of my swap file... it was lag as in mouse would stop for 5 seconds sometimes. I've got individual disks, a raid1 and two raid5s... doesn't make a difference, also using both nvidia sata and sil3114 controllers and doesn't seem to matter.

Usually when the mouse starts to stutter a few times I'll know a download just finished and its being hashed.

2.6.18-ck1 #1 SMP PREEMPT, Opteron 180

Myabe I'll try turning preempt off again, although honestly every kernel / setting I've tried hasn't made much of a difference.

defenderBG · l33t Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 817

merlin · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2003 Posts: 44 Location: Oregon, USA

I'm running an Athlon64 3000+ on an ECS nforce3 based motherboard. hdparm shows good throughput for my drives (all PATA). But when I do things like emerge --sync everything slows to a crawl, with the system at 99%+ wait.

I don't have preemption enabled in my kernel.

Linux naruto 2.6.17-gentoo-r8 #1 Mon Sep 11 04:20:54 PDT 2006 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

Very much the same issue here.

Any ideas?

t0mcat · Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2006 3:11 am Post subject:

yeah i'm having the same problem... insanely slow and unresponsive system since last backup-restore.

i did it with a plain "cp -a" from an ext3 fs to an ext3 partition usb drive. repartitioned the drive with xfs, then copied back from the usb ext3 to the new xfs partition. now the system (an acer 1511lmi laptop) is even slower than my k7-700 server-box, with a pata drive and xfs file-systems... i'm gonna try some defrag with the xfs tools, but sounds useless.
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a.k.a etienne

trueshanti · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2006 Posts: 30 Location: Thailand

still waiting for 2.6.19

i really hope this kernel would erase this nasty lagginess

best wishes
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t0mcat · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 12:37 am Post subject:

downgrading to gentoo-sources 2.6.17-r8 seems to have improved the situation here, although the system is not responsive as it used to be some time ago. by the way i did a mass update so i can't really say wich the cause could be.

just for info:

i had no sata drives, it's an amd64 laptop compiled with march=ahtlon64 & mtune=k8 , using kernel built-in drivers for the nforce3 chipset, and gcc-4.1.1.

the issue was slowing down the system even with a 1% cpu occupation, during disk accesses like source-unpacking, portage cache upgrading, and generic emerge usage.

i'm gonna do more testing with different kernel sources and options.
_________________
il gattaccio
a.k.a etienne

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

Yep, same problem here.
It seems like the slow down doesnt happen only when there is a high access to the HD, or completely overload the HD, but simple tasks like syncing or regen world by portage will cause the same thing.
I hope there is a solution soon. this is VERY frustrating.

funkmankey · Guru Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 304 Location: CH

same problem here as everyone, have had it for much too long without trying hard enough to find a solution!!! went away when I switched from a venice core to denmark, but quickly returned. hell I am pretty sure I even had some symptoms of it back when I was still using socket-a.

currently:

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 186

Disabling preemption helped for me as well. If there's high disk traffic I'll get a short stutter in video but then it display smoothly throughout the disk activity. Not good, but better then before.

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

Same results. Disabling preempt helps a lot.
Though I expected better performance from my Core2Duo E6600 with 2GB RAM.
But oh well

Also, I notice that the kernel does not divide the interrupts, at all!

bexamous2 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Nov 2005 Posts: 80

bexamous@bexus ~ $ cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0 CPU1
0: 3743415 575638883 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 1122 145350 IO-APIC-edge i8042
8: 1127010 181646262 IO-APIC-edge rtc
9: 0 0 IO-APIC-level acpi
50: 61263 1208400 IO-APIC-level libata
58: 66309 1225770 IO-APIC-level libata
66: 0 3 IO-APIC-level ehci_hcd:usb1
74: 42333 5175845 IO-APIC-level EMU10K1
217: 981836 156447437 IO-APIC-level ohci_hcd:usb2, eth0
225: 235323 40705714 IO-APIC-level libata, nvidia
233: 245213 49464098 IO-APIC-level libata, nvidia
NMI: 270 178
LOC: 579297399 579240030
ERR: 0
MIS: 0
bexamous@bexus ~ $

I don't have to use irqbalance and both cpus are handling interrupts... not perfectly 50/50 though. Anyone know why libata and nvidia have to share irqs though? I don't think there is any way to change IRQs really though is there? -- other than moving cards around which isn't doable.

Nov 23 11:25:52 bexus warning: many lost ticks.
Nov 23 11:25:52 bexus Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts

I've gotten that message 41 times since January (around when I installed gentoo).

Linux bexus 2.6.18-ck1-r1 #1 SMP Thu Nov 16 00:21:13 PST 2006 x86_64 Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 170 AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

you probably have dynamic overclocking in the kernel causing the lost ticks.

st0ne · n00b Joined: 22 Jan 2004 Posts: 18

hi,

same problem here on two machines...
one is Core2Duo E6300 with sata hardware, the other is an old celeron 2.4Ghz with ide hardware...
both show same error... when i have much disk IO, then the cpu goes to wait and systemperformance is very poor...
on both machines is preemt off!!

greez st0ne

titusthefox · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2005 Posts: 6 Location: PO Italy

Hello I have the same problem when I make emerge --sync or when I load Eclipse with java (more small files).

My kernel is:

Linux localhost 2.6.18-gentoo-r2 #1 Fri Dec 1 19:13:23 CET 2006 x86_64 Mobile AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

I have tried all suggestion that that you gift up (disable irq sharing .....) but the performances have the same problem. I havre tried to downgrade at kernel 2.6.17-r9 but I haven't seen improvements....

juhah · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2004 Posts: 46

Have you tried to re-produce this problem by dual booting to some other OS?

If you can observe the same behavior under some other OS then the issue is most likely hardware related. However, if you cannot reproduce this then you should try to dual boot to some other well known distro and see how it behaves.

With these tests you should be able to narrow problem to either bad hardware, Linux kernel in general or to problem with your Gentoo installation.

If the issue is in your Gentoo installation then it might be a good idea to try sys-kernel/genkernel. Also, double check that you have correct and reasonable CFLAGS.

st0ne · n00b Joined: 22 Jan 2004 Posts: 18

hi,

i've tried it with windows... the speed there is normal...

i'm using genkernel, next time i will try without it...

greez st0ne

Icer · Guru Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 395 Location: @home

If you are using gamin check this out. I noticed that gamin was eating over 50% of available memory. I'm now trying out the tips mentioned in the thread.

Alternatively if you use fam you might want to search the forums if it can cause similar problems.
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Everything can be done. There's just a longer delivery time for impossible projects.

kingmanowar · n00b Joined: 15 Oct 2005 Posts: 20

Hi

I have exactly the same problem. I was upgrading to gnome 2.16 yesterday night and I could barely do something else while compiling. Even browsing the web is terrible, scrolling the page...becomes jumping in the page, flash videos become really choppy... I tried the 'tips' from this thread but none of them really worked.
Is it definitely related with the kernel ? SATA drivers ?
Anyone has tried the kernel 2.6.19 yet ? It is a really annoying problem. I have ubuntu for x86 on my machine as well and i do not have the problem.
My config is an amd athlon 64 3800+ dual core, SATA hard drive.

Thanks for anyhelp.

Desintegr · Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:56 am Post subject:

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

Okay, so I am using 2.6.19-ck2 sources.
It seems like the freezing is still there. No preempt.

I did some testing, and I noticed freezing happens a lot when using VMware.
So I started logging with iostat, and this is what i found that happens DURING a freeze:

Bornio · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 129

Well, I thought changing /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs to something low like "2" or even "0" would help, and it seemed like it did, i am not sure, i launched vmware and this is what happened at some point:

Icer · Guru Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 395 Location: @home