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

[psypher]

I have been running the 2.6.35 + iofix kernel for more than a week and
unfortunately I am unable to see any difference.  For example upon boot
and logging into the desktop, my ubuntuone account will start doing it's
syncing thing. I have about 20GB in the u1 folder and it takes about
5-10 minutes every boot to scan all the files and check for changes and
sync etc. During that time the hard drive thrashes like crazy and when
monitoring iotop the ubuntuone processes are reading and writing to the
disk at about 400KB/s. During this process my PC is extremely slow and
unresponsive. The default test is to boot up, start firefox and try a
click a bookmark folder icon on my toolbar, which drops down a list of
bookmarks. Firefox starts up ok, but it takes about 5 minutes for the
drop down list to open once I click on it. No really 5 minutes.

Another default test is to boot up, let u1 do it's thing and quiet down,
the open firefox. Then I start "stress -d 1" to stress out the disk and
try and browse using firefox. I open Google Reader and try browse
through my RSS feeds. While stress is running it practically impossible
to to use or browse in firefox. Note stress is now reading and writing
at 4-10MB/s. There seems no difference in responsiveness between the
disk writing at 400KB/s or 4MB/s. And there seems no difference between
the default kernel or this patched one.

Very sad :(

Are the guys who are seeing a difference doing anything else? Turning
off swap? Changing the default scheduler? Why do some people see an
improvement? Even though the improvements are still not good enough.

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