Houston, we have a problem: big file copying, USB, external disks

From: John Zupfel
Date: Mon May 18 2009 - 08:04:40 EST



Are recent kernels (since somewhere around 2.6.27 - 2.6.28)
choking on big file copying?


https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/197762?comments=all

Quoting the latest post:
> No, it's not Ubuntu specific and Canonical didn't cause it.
>
> Right now I'm copying between two SATA drives, connected to my PC via
> eSATA. So far a lousy 600MB has been copied and I'm already down to
> 5MB/s and falling.
>
> Here is what I know about the problem:
>
> It affects ALL hardware.
>
> It affects ALL file copying connections to varying degrees: USB,
> network, SATA/eSATA.
>
> In some instances, it also affects multitasking, all but locking the
> computer up despite little to no CPU use in System Monitor.
>
> There are no error logs, messages or anything else that occur when the
> problem is happening.
>
> In my experience, if you test for the problem and nothing seems to be
> wrong, then that's because you aren't copying enough data, you don't
> know how fast your hardware should be copying files, or you are lucky
> enough to only be subtly affected that time. Try copying more multi-
> gigabytes of data, several times and see if you can't get wildly
> different durations for the same data size. As I state above, all
> hardware I have tested is affected to varying degrees, some hardware
> shows minor performance degradation over time, some hardware is all but
> useless for file copying.
>
> If you ask me, it's either the scheduler (GUI lockups with no CPU usage
> makes me think this) or whatever performs the actual file copy process.
> It's definitely not a USB problem because it affects network copying
> too.




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