2010/11/26 Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>: > Hi there, > > As per subject, what's the best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk > activity, please? > > Or perhaps a better question would be: what approaches are available? > > Presently my main Linux system is basically just a storage server with a > *really slow* disk controller. I do all my web-browsing and email (and most > other things) on my Mac laptop (because my Mac desktop has recently died ☹), > but I occasionally do some bash or perl scripting, searches and other stuff > on this Linux box. > > Normally this isn't a problem - the machine is an old Pentium 4 but plenty > powerful enough for this simple command-line stuff. However I have recently > bought a new STB which plays DVD .iso files across the network, so I started > ripping DVDs on storage server, using dvdbackup && mkisofs. When I do so, > interactivity becomes *dire* - it takes maybe 15 seconds for *any* command to > execute. > > My immediate reaction was to consider the recent "200-line patch to kernel => > superkernel" thread: > http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/user/221770 > > But I have also heard of `ionice` in the past: > http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice > > I've never used that - in fact, I can't recall ever having to use the regular > `nice` - but I think maybe I should consider it. > > Does anyone have any thoughts, please? >
I use ionice & nice when running paludis in the background and it does the job pretty well: alias paludis='ionice -c 3 nice -n 19 paludis' Just remember that for ionice to work properly you need to have the CFQ I/O scheduler enabled. Best regards, Maciej Grela
