[Bug 131094] Re: Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness

[Ben Gamari]

@cornbread

Comments like that really don't help. Moreover, this is a kernel issue
that is affecting all distributions across the board; I recently came to
Ubuntu from Fedora where it was just as bad.

However, things are looking pretty good for getting this fixed by
2.6.31, which as it stands will be in Karmic. Last month there was a set
of patches[1] posted to the LKML reworking the page eviction code to
give executable code priority over streaming pages, which should help
the thrashing situation quite a bit.

Secondly, there is the Jens Axboe's per-bdi flusher threads which seem
to be kicking some serious ass in initial testing[2].

Lastly, there was very recently a breakthrough on the kernel.org
incarnation of this bug where Thomas Pilarski's tireless efforts in
bisecting the issue finally resulted in some measurably regressing
commits. Jens has already looked at the commits in question and it looks
very promising that we'll see at least some improvement come of this.

All in all, don't fret, things are looking up. It's certainly a
frustrating bug for users and developers alike, but I think the efforts
of the community may about to pay off.

- Ben


[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/33818
[2] http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/28/164
[3] http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309#c360

-- 
Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
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