What does it takes to bring a system down to its knee ?

["Mathieu Malaterre" <mathieu.malaterre@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

  I wrote a little program that parse recursively all file found
within a toplevel directory. As soon as the process start my whole X
session (KDE/debian stable) becomes completely unresponsive. I manage
-painfully- to start a top to monitor my process:

It is returning:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
21007 mmalater  18   0  118m  62m 1120 D    3  1.6   1:14.08 gdcmscanner
...

  AFAIK that does not seems to neither: memory hungry nor process
hungry. Is this correct ? If so this means my system is getting slower
because of the disk operation, right ? Any tool to monitor that or
track down why my system is so unresponsive ?

This is a 4 processors machine with 4Gb or RAM (Linux zorglub
2.6.18-6-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 16 22:30:01 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux).
Filesystem is LVM over ext3fs (I think, can't remember).

thanks

-- 
Mathieu