Re: Unresponiveness of 2.4.16

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > 2.4.16 becomes very unresponsive for 30 seconds or so at a time during
> > large unarchiving of tarballs, like tar -zxf mozilla-src.tar.gz. The
> > file is about 36mb. I run top in one window, run free repeatedly in
> 
> This seems to be one of the small as yet unresolved problems with the newer
> VM code in 2.4.16. I've not managed to prove its the VM or the differing
> I/O scheduling rules however.

FWIW...

I experienced quite the same unresponsiveness but more in the order of 4-5
seconds since I started to use ext3 with RH 7.2 (i.e. kernel 2.4.7 based).  
I'm currently running 2.4.15-pre7 and the same momentary stalls are there
just like with 2.4.7. It is much more visible when applying large patches to
a kernel source tree as the patch output stops scrolling from time to time
for about 5 secs.  I never saw such thing while previously using reiserfs.  
I've yet to try reiserfs on a 2.4.16 tree to see if this is actually an ext3
problem.

Nicolas