Re: sluggish system responsiveness under higher IO load

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006 12:00:37 +0200
Matthias Dahl <mlkernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Since I bought my current system, I have experienced sluggish system
responsiveness when the IO load increases to a certain point.

For example: when I emerge (gentoo system) new kernel sources, during the
untar process of the archive, Xorg gets sluggish, meaning you can sometimes
see the entire desktop or windows repainting or the mouse pointer jumps
around. From time to time, depending on the IO load, even typing in the
console doesn't respond right away.

I opened a thread in the gentoo support forum for amd64 which brought some
details to light: it doesn't seem to be a nforce4 or amd64 related problem,
because other people on newer intel based systems run into exactly the same
problems. It looks like a general sata issue. Here a link to the thread:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731.html

I'd suggest that you generate a kernel profile while the sluggishness is
happening.

Boot with "profile=1" on the kernel boot command line. Then run:

readprofile -r
do-sluggish-thing
readprofile -n -v -m /boot/System.map | sort -n -k 3 | tail -40


Or, better-but-more-complex: oprofile.
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