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Re: How to make apps play nice?



On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 09:58:17AM +0900, Craig Hagerman wrote:
> 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.

Make sure the correct ide driver is loaded for your chipset.
ide-generic can't use dma and then cpu load will be much higher and disk
access much lower.

You may have to fiddle with the initrd generating scripts if you also
use sata since it would probably only load one driver for the root disk
and let something else take care of the rest later.

This is assuming your chipset is even supported by the kernel you are
running.

Len Sorensen



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