On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 05:53:36PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > also sprach Dave Sherohman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002.01.07.1709 +0100]: > > Although I think that ALSA sounds like the most likely source of trouble, > > based on previous responses, I'll also point out that, with load in the > > 3-4 range but CPU at 75% idle, your major bottleneck is most likely I/O, > > not processor time, so nice isn't likely to help much (if at all). > > that's a pretty good point. i'll look into it. what are disk intensive > processes that don't eat CPU time? cp?
Possibly. The first thing I look at when I see a situation like that is the output of `free`. If the free mem shown on the +/- line is less than the used swap on the last line, then any process could become arbitrarily disk intensive. I don't recall whether you said you were ripping CDs at the time, but it's normal for each instance of cdparanoia (or similar) to add a point to your load average, but that should have little to no effect on system performance - it's spending the vast majority of its time waiting for the CD's read buffer to fill. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
