Re: high load on heavy disk i/o (fwd)

Giuliano Pochini (pochini@denise.shiny.it)
Sun, 03 Oct 1999 11:23:15 CEST


>On running "cp -ax / archive", to create a backup for burning to CD,
the
>system exhibited similar symptoms. CPU usage went to 100%, load was
over
>3 and X became very sluggish, with the mouse pointer updating taking
>several seconds. Running top showed that kflushd was using 35-40% CPU.

Hmm, I never experienced this problem, but when I copy lerga files from
a slow fast media to a slower one (HD --> MO), the system becoms very
slow to load programs. I suppose the cause is that all available memory
gets filled with buffers and there is no space left to load something.
This, combined with the bug|feature that causes memory being swapped
even if there still is free memory, results in temporary freeze of some
processes. Anyway, CPU usage remains normal.

--
Bye.

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