Re: Hard disk access causes high CPU load
Get hdparm package and run hdparm /dev/hda or sda or what ever your root hard
drive is, and that will give you information on your hard drive usually hdparm
-d1 /dev/hda will turn on dma try hdparm -d1 -m16 -c1 /dev/hda that should take
care of most of it. I had the same problem as you and someone helped me out with
it.
Balazs Javor wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How can I find out whether the hard disks in my Woody box
> are using the best possible DMA mode (or any DMA at all)?
>
> Allthough I have a relativly slow machine (VIA C3 800 + 256MB),
> I have an ATA100 controller (VIA PL133) and two Seagate Barracuda IVs.
> So they should be relatively fast and use not much CPU, or shouldn't
> they?
>
> But on my 2.4.18 machine it can take ages to transfer large file
> between them. And while the file transfer takes place the CPU
> usage is above 90% and XFree becommes _extremely_ sluggish.
> Even if I try to move the mouse there are stops and a quite large lag...
>
> Is this normal, or do I need to set up something differently?
>
> >From dmesg I can see something like this:
>
> Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
> ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
> VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
> VP_IDE: chipset revision 6
> VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
> ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd000-0xd007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
> ...
> hda: ST380021A, ATA DISK drive
> hdb: ST380021A, ATA DISK drive
>
> (Just noticed) Under /proc/ide/hda/settings I have:
>
> using_dma 0 0 1 rw
>
> So it seems DMA is off, right?
>
> What do I need to do?
>
> Many thanks for your help in advance!
> best regards,
> Balazs
>
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