Journaling is killing response time

[O. Sinclair]

On 12/03/2015 05:51, David Lang wrote:
> 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
> 
I just went through replacing a drive as well, in my case the errors
were numbers of system freezes and in one case actually data loss (well
I had a recent backup so I could restore).

To now and then use some diskcheck software is actually a very good idea.