Journaling is killing response time

[David Lang]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2015, Bruce Marshall wrote:

> On 03/11/2015 11:08 AM, Bill Vance wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> It's still an option, at least on my 12.04 install disk, plus I
>> heard they did a major update not too long ago.
>> 
>> Bill
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, 8 Mar 2015, bmarsh at bmarsh.com wrote:
>> 
>>> Is reiserfs currently supported?
>
> Well, here's the final chapter in the "Journaling is killing response time" 
> story.
>
> I had checked the "SDB" drive, which seemed to be the one with the problems, 
> with SMARTCTL and it said it passed all the tests, although it also showed 
> some  errors... (less than 50)
>
> So I moved my /home partition from the "B" to the "A" drive and that seemed 
> to take care of a lot of the response issues.
>
> But when I started up a photo program, and it had lots of activity on the "B" 
> again, the response time was really bad.  Again, SMARTCTL showed that the 
> drive passed but with a few recorded errors.
>
> I replaced the "B" drive with a new drive and now everything is back to 
> normal....  Don't know what the real problem was but it was obviously the 
> fault of the drive.
>
> I was beginning to think the problem was due to EXT4 partitions but will take 
> your advice and move some things from EXT3 to EXT4.

I've run across drives that are starting to fail that have this sort of problem, 
the drive needs to retry many times (and the OS retries a few times, multiplying 
the two), causing long delays when accessing specific areas of the disk.

David Lang