Public bug reported:
1) The release of Ubuntu you are using, via 'lsb_release -rd' or System ->
About Ubuntu
Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
2) The version of the package you are using, via 'apt-cache policy pkgname' or
by checking in Software Center
linux-image-generic 4.15.0.43.45
3) What you expected to happen
HDD performance is not unnecessary slow by default because the wrong "cfq" IO
scheduler is used
4) What happened instead
HDD performance is slow compared to other systems where other IO scheduler like
"deadline" or "noop" is used. Even random OOM killings occur because swap
performance is too low.
Hi all,
About a year ago I moved from CentOS 7 to Ubuntu 18.04 on a couple of
older desktop and laptop machines. One of the things I noticed after the
switch, was that disk IO performances seemed to be degraded, and the
machines often became unresponsive with lot of IO load, like copying
files or swapping when a lot of memory was used. People on other Ubuntu
machines with HDD that I know or use the mentioned machines, also
complained about annoying system lockups and hangs. Degrading IO
performance could be caused by many things, like drivers, wrong block
size aligning, heavier desktop environment and applications and browsers
and web applications that become heavier in RAM and IO usage. I tried
several things like using lighter XFCE environment, switching from
Firefox to Chrome, adding adblockers and webtracker blockers, and using
a tab suspension plugin, to lower memory usage. But low performance
issues still remained and it appeared that especially swapping became
terribly slow and even the kernel OOM killer started killing random
applications, something I haven't experienced before on desktop
machines.
After a while I found out that on the old CentOS 7 installs, the disk IO
scheduler was set to "deadline", while on the Ubuntu 18.04 installs, it
is "cfq". So a month ago on three Ubuntu 18.04 I switched the scheduler
from "cfq" to "noop". Guess what, after a month I can conclude that the
machines turned to be much more responsive, no strange OOM killings
anymore, and even when significant swap is used, the machine is still
responsive and workable. I set it on other peoples computers as well and
also there, complaints about slowness disappeared.
Could it be that
1. the CFQ schedulers, that stands for "Complete Fairness Queueing", is causing
all processes to use disk IO randomly simultaneously, and that is causing heavy
seeking activity on old-fashion rotating HDDs, causing it to severely lower the
IO throughput?
2. it is better to by default use the "deadline" or "noop" IO scheduler for
HDDs, by putting the following in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-scheduler.rules:
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]",
ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1",ATTR{queue/scheduler}="noop"
to gain much better IO performance in general for "older" systems using HDDs.
3. is this something others experience as well, although I think there is no
'placebo' effect on my side. Is it wise to test with some benchmark?
Systems involved that I tested:
1. AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 640 Processor, 8GB RAM, Western Digital Blue 7200rpm
1TB disk (WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0)
2. Acer Aspire R3-471T-33NP laptop, Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4005U CPU, 4GB RAM,
Seagate Laptop Thin HDD 5400rpm 500GB disk (ST500LT012-1DG142)
3. Acer Veriton L4630G desktop, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4440S CPU, 8GB RAM,
Western Digital Red 5400rpm 3TB disk (WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0)
These machines are all installed with LVM and amount of swap that equals
the amount of RAM, contrary the Ubuntu defaults of configuring plain
disk partitions and only 950MB of swap. This mainly because I want the
flexibility of LVM when I need to change disk configurations later on,
and I want to be able to use Hibernation (suspend to disk)
Typical usage: browsing websites, emailing using Thunderbird, using
LibreOffice documents, occasional copying over large amounts of files
to/from external USB disks, occasional image and video editing.
I see my more modern Thinkpad T450s laptop with SSD with Ubuntu 18.04 is
also using CFQ, but there I never experience IO slowness, even when GBs
of swap are in use. Probably CFQ works fine with SSDs that have much
lower seek times.
** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1812569
Title:
Default kernel "cfq" I/O scheduler results in worse rotating disk
performance than necessary
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