On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Dirk Uys <dirkc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi > > This has been bothering me for some time now. I have a Dell PC at work, > Intel Core2 Duo with 4gb ram etc. Whenever something does a lot of disk > access, the PC slows down to a halt? I remember some issue between Firefox > and the kernel causing long pauses, but I've had several different kernel > versions running. > > I also use the ntfs-3g driver for write access to a doze partition, but > although the degradation in performance more severe with the ntfs-3g driver, > access to the native (ext3) partition also drags the system down for a > while. > > I checked obvious things like whether or not I enable SMP in the kernel. I > tried changing the kernel pre-emption from low latency desktop to desktop, > but the problem persist. The application that is mostly involved when I get > these long delays is FireFox, VMWare and emerge (emerge --sync). Everything > is compiled 64bit but I have the 32bit emulation libs. > > Can anyone point me into some direction? >
A tool I've always found useful for determining IO hog processes is sys-process/iotop HTH- James
