On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 10:53 -0600, Connie Sieh wrote:
> g1vrg,
> 
> What sata chipset is used in this motherboard?
> 
> What does iostat show during the dd?
> (may be a issue of response is really slow)

Chipsets:
VIA K8T800
VIA VT8273

#iostat /dev/sda

Linux 2.6.18-194.26.1.el5 (linux.home)   01/05/2011

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          18.82    5.09    6.37    1.04    0.00   68.68

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
sda              13.52       266.27       792.31    2362447    7029742


I will be reloading with SL 6.0 as soon as I have found out how to
enable dag, atrpm, epel and rpm forge as that system is much more
responsive (i tried it).

Thanks for your interest.
Richard.




> 
> 
> -Connie Sieh
> 
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, g1vrg 
> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 13:37 +0100, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> On Jan 5, 2011, at 13:30, g1vrg wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi, I have noticed that in default SL5.5 disk operations tend to hugely
> >>> tie up my pc. For example when writing large files (of the order of 10
> >>> GB) I may have to wait 30 seconds before I can get a response from
> >>> another application on the desktop. Is there another i/o scheduler other
> >>> than the default that I can specify presumably as a kernel command in
> >>> the grub boot loader config file? I recently swapped over from debian
> >>> lenny and the i/o scheduler there
> >>
> >> which one was it?
> >
> > Sorry I don't know.
> >
> >>
> >> You can change I/O schedulers per block device on the fly:
> >>
> >> # cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
> >> noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]
> >> # echo noop >> /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
> >> # cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
> >> [noop] anticipatory deadline cfq
> >>
> >> I guess you get the idea. Let us know which one works best for you (and what hardware you have).
> >>
> >
> > Ok thanks. I tried elevator=noop, elevator=as and elevator=deadline
> >
> > They were each pretty much the same. If I do a large file copy or dd
> > operation I get freezes on the desktop and xmms freezes and stops
> > playing music for example.
> >
> > The hardware is a seagate 250GB sata drive with lvm on a msi mobo with
> > amd64 cpu (3700+ @2.2 GHz) with 32bit SL5.5.
> >
> > maybe I need to pass some CFQ params? Or it could be something else
> > entirely. It's just these file operations that cause the trouble for me
> > (and the wife! lol - she was on debian before and i switched her).
> >
> > Anyway, if anyone else has noticed this and has a fix they know of I'd
> > appreciate a reply. I don't want to try lots of experiments or tests,
> > I'll be moving on to SL 6 when it's out in March time.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Richard G
> >