Re: Heavy disk io spasms (2.6.28, ext4)
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 16:42, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
> On 01/19/2009 02:39 PM, Kelly Clowers wrote:
>>
>> Since I got my new computer, I have occasionally experienced times
>> when my HD light would come on and all apps stall for a few seconds.
>> These seem to come in swarms, with 2-10 happening separated by
>> 1-30 seconds, then nothing for hours or even days. Watching iotop,
>> it seems to bekjournald2, but is hard to tell, because after iotop
>> unsticks,
>> the entries appear only briefly.
>>
>> The most obvious things I can think of that might be at the root of
>> this is that I am using a self compiled (but Debianized) 2.6.28
>> kernel, and ext4.
>
> You think it's happening on the ext4 partition?
/ is ext3, /usr, /var, /home et al are ext4
> I'm about to put some relatively-unused files on an ext4 partition, and I'll
> see what happens myself.
>
>> Overall system is sid/experimental AMD64. Hardware is Core 2,
>> Intel MB (ICH8), pata system disk, sata data disk.
>>
>> Has anyone heard/experienced anything related, or does
>> anyone know how to get better info than from iotop?
>
> By-partition info?
Or just some way seeing what spikes the io, other than
straining to see something that is on the screen for a split
second.
I have searching for more info, and I saw some suggestions
that atime or swappiness could be involved. So I turned on
noatime for some partitions. So far everything has been fine,
but it hasn't really been long enough to tell for sure. I did
have noatime on my old computer.
Cheers,
Kelly Clowers
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