[EN] System freezes during high disk activity

[grif]

Hi,  I just installed siduction to give it a try.  Everything seems to be working except when there is much disk activity, the entire desktop freezes or lags.  Sometimes it will freeze for 10 seconds or more (no USB mouse movement, no keyboard, no display update).  What is really odd is that during these freezes even the disk activity stops.

I reproduce this by copying a large file on a sata drive to that same drive, then copying a second file on the same drive.

I was previously using aptosid (3.5-4.slh.6-aptosid-amd64) and never encountered any mouse lag, nor have I had such a problem with this system using other distros.

I tried:

Code: [Select]

echo NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS > /sys/kernel/debug/sched_features

in rc.local, and also tried renice -10 for X.  No affect on the problem.

Should I give up on siduction?  Is it a problem in towo kernel?  Any way to fix this?  Thanks.

Siduction kernel is 3.11-6.towo-siduction-amd64

[grif]

I still have aptosid installed as well, so I did a dist-upgrade to 3.11-6.slh.1-aptosid-amd64.  No sign of the problem there.  About the same processes seem to running on aptosid.

In siduction I notice the choppy mouse movement appears after the disk write cache seems to be full.  If it does the complete freeze for 10 seconds or so, the disk seems to finish writing what it has, then goes quiet until the display unfreezes and it resumes.  Also noticed it copying a large file to a usb stick.

[Ironwalker]

see what is useing the most cpu% in something like ksysguard or system monitor.
It may be related to the database indexer. You could head to system settings/desktop search and set things correctly.

[dibl]

Some troubleshooting questions --

Same DE on aptosid and siduction?

Can you see a difference in swap or kswapd behavior between aptosid and siduction?

Any differences in /etc/sysctl.conf?

Same I/O scheduler?

Same filesystem type and mount options?

Is the CPU frequency control the same on both OSs?

You can sort your running processes in top according to their swap usage. In top, press O (capital letter "o"), then p, then press Enter.  If you screen capture one, then you can compare it when you run the other OS.