Follow Up - Sporadic, Jerky X Response

[Brian Hanks]

________________________________________________________________________
> From: Gene Delitzoy <delitzoy at telus.net>
> To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Subject: Re: Follow Up - Sporadic, Jerky X Response
> Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 12:07:14 -0600
> 
> On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 06:28, Brian Hanks wrote:
> > > Has anyone else experienced what I will call sporadic, jerky X response
> > > in FC2?  It seems that any time I have a background process running that
> > > is even remotely taking to the CPU or IO, I have pathetic response in
> > > X.  
> > > 
> > > My RH9 box and my FC1 box don't have this issue and they are slower
> > > machines with less memory and older disk.  Could it be related to the
> > > fact that I'm not using the NVIDIA driver on FC2 and I am on the other
> > > two?
> > > 
> > > I quite reluctant to make the switch to FC2 without solving this issue. 
> > > It's quite annoying to have X become unstable every time I go to compile
> > > something in the background.  
> > > 
> > > Hardware Setup:
> > > Asus A7V600
> > > 1 GB RAM
> > > 2 Samsung 120 GB SATA drives (RAID1 with LVM)
> > > NVIDIA MX440
> > > FC2 fully updated
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > Brian Hanks
> > > bhanks bhanks com
> > 
> > 
> > Upon further digging, it looks like kblockd & kjournald
> > are chewing up a ton of CPU.  Any ideas?
> > 
> > Thanks again,
> > -Brian
> > bhanks at bhanks.com
> > 
> I have seen this on my machine as well. p3 993 dual, scsi sym53c8xx,
> Matrox Millennium G450.
> Just seems to go away after a bit.
> 
> 

Exactly.  I'm even noticing it when I don't have large processes
running.  It's definitely not as severe, but it seems to be occurring
quite regularly.  

As a test, I built a completely different machine with FC2.  This other
machine exhibited the exact same behavior.  Both of these machines have
1024 MB of RAM.  One is a Athlon XP 3000+ and the other is a P4 2.4 Ghz,
so they aren't slow.  

The one thing that I haven't done is to remove LVM2 and RAID from the
picture.  I wonder if that would eliminate the problem?

What exactly is the function of kblockd and kjournald?

If anyone else has any insight, please let me know.

-Brian Hanks
bhanks at bhanks.com