Re: temporarily system freeze with high I/O write to ext2 fs

[James Stevenson]

> > why is it that Linux 'hangs' while doing heavy I/O operations (such as
dd)
> > to (and perhaps from?) ext2 file systems? I can't see the same behaivour
> > when using other file systems, such as ReiserFS
> >
>
> A partial fix for this went into 2.4.17-pre2.  What kernel are you
> using?

i have always had with problem normally during disk writes.
currently on 2.4.x-14 + 2.4.16

> For how long does it "hang"?   What exactly are you doing when it
> occurs?

its not that it hangs but it gets extremely laggy eg 2/3 seconds pause
for keyboard input to appear on a console.

> Is your disk system well-tuned?  What throughput do you get with
> `hdparm -t /dev/hdXX'?

i have tuned with hdparm as much as i can. but i cannot tune the
VM because the files in /proc/sys/vm do not seem to make any difference
to the system at all and the documents dont seem to be correct inn
procfs.txt
if docs are wrong for a kernel version would it not be better to either say
they are wrong
or remove them alll together. but i assume this is todo with the latest VM
change.

are there going to be new documents for these files ?

    James