Rediculous amount of IO use when updating packages!

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 16:21 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Kavon Farvardin wrote:
> > So I installed Fedora 11 recently on my ThinkPad R61, and had 560+
> > packages to update. Installing and cleaning the packages has been
> taking
> > FOREVER. Almost several hours, I've had to stop it so often (and
> restart
> > it with yum-continue-transaction) because it lags my entire system.
> It's
> > all IO use too, the CPU is barely being used!
> > 
> > I have installed a solid state drive in my laptop and it shouldn't
> be so
> > slow at deleting or cleaning packages, it's doing one every 5
> seconds or
> > more. Is there some bug with SSDs and yum? (maybe python related as
> it
> > seems yum is written in python?) I have no speed issues with
> anything
> > else, and when I installed this drive it was a huge overall
> performance
> > improvement over my 5400 RPM disk. I'm also using ext4 as it was the
> > default, and I think a Logical Volume setup instead of a partition
> based
> > one (again, default settings).
> > 
> > What should I do?
> > 
> There was a thread here from Patrick O'Callaghan that may help. It
> was about USB flash drives, but it will probably apply to SSDs as
> well.

I wouldn't be too sure. The kernel parameter is related to write
operations over the USB bus. Since SSD drives aren't connected via USB,
I doubt it would have any effect.

The quickest check would be to see
if /sys/block/<drive>/device/max_sectors exists for the SSD.

poc