I/O Scheduling results in poor responsiveness

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:37:31 -0800
Nathan Grennan <fedora-list at cygnusx-1.org> wrote:

> Why is the command below all that is needed to bring the system to 
> it's knees?

I see a lot of variation in this kind of thing. Copying a big
backup file to my external usb hard driver made my system stutter
a bit (though nothing like what you describe), but I have recently
dd'ed up some disk images for xen, and the system worked perfectly
well during that operation.

This was on fedora 8 x86_64 with sata disks.