On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Alex Schuster <wo...@wonkology.org> wrote: > Neil Bothwick writes: > >> On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: >> >> > I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, >> > including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I >> > finally have to actually do some work. >> >> I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I >> had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not >> updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays >> disappeared. > > There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not > be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can > use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out > yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related > to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only > 100 M were being used.
Hi, I realize this thread is bigger than an encyclopedia by now, so I apologize if this has already been suggested. :) I'm curious if you look at /proc/interrupts if the disk with I/O problems is sharing interrupt with some other device. Maybe there is a conflict of some sort. On my motherboard, one of the SATA controllers shares an interrupt with the soundcard, for example.