This is a problem that I've learned to live with since I first installed a SATA hard disk. It afflicts two different systems, one running Ubuntu and the other Debian.
When executing commands or programs on large files (> 100 MB), the system becomes unresponsive. Among such commands are: (1) sha1sum -c dvdimage.sha1 (2) genisoimage dir/ > dvdimage.iso By unresponsive, I mean it takes far much longer for subsequent commands to execute. Iceweasel takes tens of seconds to pop up. When I type text into a window even in a low-resource program like vim, it takes several seconds before the text appears. The system, in short, appears to hang, at least until the program doing the large file access finishes execution. Some info about my Debian installation: Disk is a 500 GB hard drive found at /dev/sda. $ lsmod | grep ata ata_generic 10116 0 libata 165472 2 ata_generic,ahci scsi_mod 160760 4 sg,sr_mod,sd_mod,libata dock 14112 1 libata $ uname -srvm Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 #1 SMP Sat Nov 8 18:25:23 UTC 2008 x86_64 I suspect this is either a scheduling problem or a module conflict. Is there some kernel magic or option I need to disable or enable to make this problem go away? If I remember correctly, I didn't encounter this problem when I was using PATA drives with DMA enabled. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
