Since I got my new computer, I have occasionally experienced times
when my HD light would come on and all apps stall for a few seconds.
These seem to come in swarms, with 2-10 happening separated by
1-30 seconds, then nothing for hours or even days. Watching iotop,
it seems to bekjournald2, but is hard to tell, because after iotop unsticks,
the entries appear only briefly.

The most obvious things I can think of that might be at the root of
this is that I am using a self compiled (but Debianized) 2.6.28
kernel, and ext4.

Overall system is sid/experimental AMD64. Hardware is Core 2,
Intel MB (ICH8), pata system disk, sata data disk.

Has anyone heard/experienced anything related, or does
anyone know how to get better info than from iotop?


Thanks,
Kelly Clowers


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

On 01/19/2009 02:39 PM, Kelly Clowers wrote:

Since I got my new computer, I have occasionally experienced times
when my HD light would come on and all apps stall for a few seconds.
These seem to come in swarms, with 2-10 happening separated by
1-30 seconds, then nothing for hours or even days. Watching iotop,
it seems to bekjournald2, but is hard to tell, because after iotop unsticks,
the entries appear only briefly.

The most obvious things I can think of that might be at the root of
this is that I am using a self compiled (but Debianized) 2.6.28
kernel, and ext4.


You think it's happening on the ext4 partition?

I'm about to put some relatively-unused files on an ext4 partition,
and I'll see what happens myself.



Overall system is sid/experimental AMD64. Hardware is Core 2,
Intel MB (ICH8), pata system disk, sata data disk.

Has anyone heard/experienced anything related, or does
anyone know how to get better info than from iotop?


By-partition info?

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

"I am not surprised, for we live long and are celebrated poopers."


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 16:42, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
> On 01/19/2009 02:39 PM, Kelly Clowers wrote:
>>
>> Since I got my new computer, I have occasionally experienced times
>> when my HD light would come on and all apps stall for a few seconds.
>> These seem to come in swarms, with 2-10 happening separated by
>> 1-30 seconds, then nothing for hours or even days. Watching iotop,
>> it seems to bekjournald2, but is hard to tell, because after iotop
>> unsticks,
>> the entries appear only briefly.
>>
>> The most obvious things I can think of that might be at the root of
>> this is that I am using a self compiled (but Debianized) 2.6.28
>> kernel, and ext4.
>
> You think it's happening on the ext4 partition?

/ is ext3, /usr, /var, /home et al are ext4

> I'm about to put some relatively-unused files on an ext4 partition, and I'll
> see what happens myself.
>
>> Overall system is sid/experimental AMD64. Hardware is Core 2,
>> Intel MB (ICH8), pata system disk, sata data disk.
>>
>> Has anyone heard/experienced anything related, or does
>> anyone know how to get better info than from iotop?
>
> By-partition info?

Or just some way seeing what spikes the io, other than
straining to see something that is on the screen for a split
second.

I have searching for more info, and I saw some suggestions
that atime or swappiness could be involved. So I turned on
noatime for some partitions. So far everything has been fine,
but it hasn't really been long enough to tell for sure. I did
have noatime on my old computer.


Cheers,
Kelly Clowers


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org