On 06/25/2012 06:17 AM, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
> On 06/25/2012 04:28 AM, Todd And Margo Chester wrote:
>> On 06/24/2012 06:56 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Todd And Margo Chester
>>> <[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>>>> Hi All,
>>>>
>>>> SL 6.2 64 bit
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone noticed that their USB 2.0 ports are really, really
>>>> slow?
>>>>
>>>> If I need to copy anything substantial to my USB 2 sticks, I
>>>> boot into Fedora Live 17 Xfce 64 bit CD. Then it goes about 20
>>>> times faster than under SL 6.2.
>>>>
>>>> Anyone have a work around?
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks, -T
>>
> I've experienced this on older Fedora releases as well as openSUSE;
> it's only been recently fixed in upstream kernels (since 3.3) and the
> fix probably hasn't been backported to the RHEL kernels yet (it's
> probably not a priority for enterprise Linux use cases)
>
> http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.3#head-f78554ef663de0fc4d2a82a79bb1fa76e20843dc
>
> "Compaction combined with Transparent Huge Pages can cause significant
> stalls with USB sticks or browser"

I thought I should point out that there is a very simple workaround 
documented in the comments section of the link above:

"My workaround is "watch -n 5 sync" when I copy files. Makes the problem 
go away completely."

Confirmed this works on my system also.

Previously trying to run livecd-iso-to-disk would take hours and make 
the system virtually unusable.  After running sync every 5 seconds as 
described above the whole thing took just 15 minutes and the system ran 
great the whole time.

Jeff