Re: severe slowdown with 2.4 series w/heavy disk access

[Alan Cox]

> When this happens in X, the mouse drags and skips, any processes running
> (like tar/gzip. ls in an empty dir takes about 10 seconds) slow down,
> and it happens usually for about 10sec-2min, often for no apparent
> reason.  The big decompression was just a way I can easily duplicate
> it.  Oddly enough though, according to top, it caches all that memory at

Ok

> once, and my free goes down to 5 megs, with the system hanging/slow to

The free behaviour is correct (free memory is wasted memory). The delays are
obviously not

> under 1% cpu while this happens, and about 50% of the cpu is in use by
> the system (not by any processes that I can see.  kupdated goes up to
> about 0.3% during this)

> > Also what disks do you have and how are they set up ?
> > -

[I meant are they in DMA / UDMA modes ?]

Alan