I'm running Debian amd64 on an Asus board with an AMD64 3200+ and a gig of ram.
This box is mainly used as a home media center and file server. Most
of the time the system monitor shows that CPU usage is around 23% and
ram usage between 40% and 80%. But for some reason when I copy files
(cp or scp network copying) it seems to take over - CPU usage shoots
up to 100% and everything else starts stuttering. Same thing also
happens with running find command or other programs. If I am listening
to music it starts skipping, if I am watching video, it basically
stops. Why is this? I know I can use 'nice' to change the niceness of
a program, but I want to know how to alter settings so that things
like cp, scp, find, etc do not hog up the entire CPU all the time, not
just on a case-by-case basis.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
Craig