[Bug 131094] Re: Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness

[Hendrik van den Boogaard]

For me the problem disappeared completely after a fresh install of
Jaunty. I think this is very strange, but two things were different from
my original install, where my previous posts were about.

* I did a fresh install of the final version of Jaunty AMD64, not the release candidate
* The first time I installed Jaunty from inside a virtual machine running under Intrepid with Virtualbox, where I actually installed Jaunty on to a real hard disk, from which I rebooted after installation (I did this because I didn't have a blank CD available at that time and this way allowed me to install from the ISO image)
* I now formatted the root/boot partition where Jaunty was installed top, to ext4

Did something in the kernel or kernel settings change between the
release candidate and the final version? Is it possible that when
installing from within a virtual machine some default settings are
different than when installing directly (I can imagine some timer
settings are different in a virtual machine, and in a system in
virtualbox the CPU is recognized as single core only).

In Windows I can imagine the systems parameters during installation are
critical for running the system later, but I though that when booting
Linux everything (all hardware) is recognized during startup so I does
not matter on which host it is running (as long as the architecture is
the same).

I used the exact same hardware and installed to the exact same partition
as the first time. I don't think changing from ext3 to ext4 is the key
here, because the slowdowns appeared when catting files from an xfs
partition (however on the same physical disk as the root partition).
When I do this  'cat * > /dev/null' on the large files the machine is
not slow anymore, and everything just seems normal and works as it does
in 8.10.

So on one hand I am a happy user now, because everything is normal
again, but on the other hand I would like to know what the cause of all
this was.

-- 
Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel
Bugs, which is subscribed to Linux.