USB Thumbdrive issue

[Tim Schmidt]

Well, OpenOffice (1.x) is slow at saving files.  By slow I mean a
minute plus for a large-ish file is not un-heard of.  Also, if your
USB pen drive is USB 1.x then it's max speed is likely ~700k/s (my
USB2 external Hard drive @ USB1.1 maxes out around 750k/s).  At
several hundred k/s speeds (Much slower than a hard drive) OpenOffice
would be even slower to save.  Meanwhile, while OpenOffice is
consuming all the bandwidth to your USB drive, opening another window
(trying to access the drive) would not get you very far.  It's a
bandwidth contention issue.

Frankly, this is all kernel-level stuff.  Gnome, OpenOffice, and
Ubuntu have very little to do with it (well, OpenOffice 2.x is much
faster at opening / saving files, but that doesn't fix the underlying
issue).  The kernel people would have to implement some sort of weird
per-process i/o limit per drive and that would be horrible.  How to
determine the limit?  What if there's only one process running?  Will
anyone put up with their drives feeling 'slower'?  Frankly, I've
observed similar phenomena in Windows (from 9x to XP) and BeOS.  It's
just a limitation of the hardware and how hard it is to share it
fairly and efficiently.

--tim


On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:07:49 -0400, Kevin Mulligan
<kevin at teamindecisive.com> wrote:
> Last night I was working in Ubuntu (4.1) using OpenOffice's presentation
> program on a MS Office Powerpoint. As I went to save it, I ran into a
> very long (minute plus) wait as, I'm guessing, the file was written to
> the drive. It was very much like the program had frozen, so I went to
> another desktop panel (can't remember the correct name, sorry) and tried
> to access the drive from there (icon was on all the desktops). It opened
> the box, but acted like the other open connection to the drive -- a
> white box that was not responding. After a while, they both kicked in
> and I was able to continue.
> 
> Is this a known/discussed problem, and what can I do?
> 
> --Kevin
> 
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