On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:38:23AM -0500, m...@neidorff.com wrote: > > Is it normal that when using the "tar" command to create a big archive, > > the whole machine becomes unresponsive, e.g. several dozens of seconds > > to do some operation (e.g. starting an xterm, or making Firefox react)? > > > > htop shows that there is still plenty of memory and atop shows nothing > > special, except 100% disk busy of course. > > > > Yes. You may want to change the "nice" level of the tar command so that > it doesn't take up so much disk time.
"nice tar" won't actually change how heavily tar uses the disk. Instead try "ionice -c3 tar" (or "nice ionice -c3 tar" if you want it to use less[*] CPU /and/ disk). [*] Note that IONice and Nice don't actually make the program use less resources, per se. They simply lower the priority of the program so that other processes can get a word in, too.
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