Re: temporarily system freeze with high I/O write to ext2 fs

[James Stevenson]

> >
> > > > why is it that Linux 'hangs' while doing heavy I/O operations (such
as
> > dd)
> > > > to (and perhaps from?) ext2 file systems? I can't see the same
behaivour
> > > > when using other file systems, such as ReiserFS
> > > >
> > >
> > > A partial fix for this went into 2.4.17-pre2.  What kernel are you
> > > using?
> >
> > i have always had with problem normally during disk writes.
> > currently on 2.4.x-14 + 2.4.16
>
> Please try 2.4.17-pre2 or later.
>

ok i should have some time to try that at the weekend.

> > its not that it hangs but it gets extremely laggy eg 2/3 seconds pause
> > for keyboard input to appear on a console.
>
> Your app got paged out, and the enormous read latencies in 2.4.16
> caused it to remain there.

why would it have been paged out there was loads of free
ram. there is 192MB in the machine and no X windows or
anything and the app was bash and there are not many other processes.

    James