Re: high load average
Jason Pepas said:
> the other day I was moving several gigs of files from one ide drive to
> another on the same ide chain (the secondary channel is broken) and my
> load average went up to around 7 (no, not 0.07). The machine would
> become unresponsive for several seconds at a time. This is a
> uniprocessor machine, both drives are ext2 filesystems.
>
> Is this normal? I don't seem to remember having ide performance issues
> like this before (this is a new install).
this is normal(in my experience) if DMA is not enabled on one or
more of the IDE drives in use.
some broken IDE chipsets(e.g. VIA) don't work well in DMA mode and
the driver may automatically revert to PIO mode(even if you told it to
use DMA) if it encounters problems in DMA mode(which prompted me to
start using promise IDE controllers on VIA boards a couple years ago)
nate
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