Abysmal performance in rawhide under I/O load

Steve Hill steve at nexusuk.org
Wed Nov 12 18:04:48 UTC 2008


I've just upgraded a Fedora 6 machine to Monday's rawhide and as a result 
the performance under I/O load has hit rock-bottom.  The machine was fine 
under Fedora 6.

The machine is an Athlon XP 2100+ with a Gigabyte GA-7VAX motherboard 
(nVidia nForce2 chipset).  The hard drives are PATA, with the controller 
listed as:
 	00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP2A IDE (rev a3)
There are 2 hard drives, and a DVD burner, all PATA.

Under heavy I/O load (for example, copying files from one hard drive to 
another), Xorg gets extremely unresponsive, to the point where rapid 
typing will sometimes result in the keyboard buffer filling up and 
dropping keystrokes.

I observed exactly the same problem on another machine (which I no longer 
have access to) when it was upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 - 
presumably something fairly major has changed in the kernel and has 
wrecked the performance.  Can anyone suggest any possible solutions?

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence




More information about the fedora-list mailing list