Disk writes cause other applications to hang

BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net · 2 days ago

Disk writes cause other applications to hang

MagicShel@lemmy.zip · 2 days ago

A 5400rpm drive is pretty slow, especially if you are comparing it to a SSD, and at 17% free you are nearing the point where file fragmentation and seek time become real I/O bottlenecks if you have an application trying to read data while you are doing a write. I haven’t willingly used a 5400rpm drive in over 20 years, but I remember violently hating them.

That being said, I’m definitely not an expert here, so I’ll be curious what others have to say.

BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net · 2 days ago

Update: ran e4defrag check, said no defragmentation necessary, all scores were low.

BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net · edit-2 2 days ago

I was told this laptop is about 10 years old, and I’ve got it from someone who is 23 years old, so i don’t doubt what i was told about it.

So it should be very suspicious that it is that slow, and also, i can usually multitask pretty well with it, so it is very surprising that it hangs like that.

I really hope i get help troubleshooting this because i have a feeling it shouldn’t be this bad.

I should probably check defragging options on linux regardless, thank you for the time you took answering this :)

MagicShel@lemmy.zip · 2 days ago

Defragging used to be necessary maintenance back in the day but I think ext4 generally handles it well and does defragging in the background automatically. But fragmentation can exist temporarily which is the only reason I brought it up.

Multitasking performance is generally a factor of system memory which at 8GB is pretty reasonable for Linux. Once you exceed that, you’ll use that swap file which I would expect would incur the same performance issues.

BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net · 2 days ago

Actually when my system does slow down when i multitask too hard, it doesn’t hang (given there is no write IO), and even running a simple application would hang if i have write IO in the background.

I understand if that’s a hard one to solve, I’ve been facing this for months and been trying to research on it and coming up with nothing. Thank you, still.

MagicShel@lemmy.zip · 1 day ago

Then it sounds very much like what is happening is that once your system starts using the swap file because you are using more memory than you have available RAM, your slow HDD is causing the performance hit.

I would bet your two possible solutions are to increase the RAM (which will just mean you can do more stuff before you start hitting this performance bottleneck) or replace your HDD with an SSD. Give that it’s a pretty old laptop, I would bet your options for replacing the HDD are limited. As long as your RAM isn’t soldered in, you can probably just buy a compatible 16GB module and swap that right out.

icerunner_origin@startrek.website · 2 days ago

You have 8GB RAM and 1 hard drive. Given the symptoms you described, I’m wondering if your system is relying heavily on swap due to memory constraints? Your swap partition being on the same drive as your system and data files would mean that access to swap could be impacted by other disk I/O and lead to slowdowns or freezes.

2 solutions to this. Increase system RAM and/or Install a second hard drive and move swap partition to this new drive.

mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz · 1 day ago

I’m afraid it’s a scheduler issue or something in mint. I have ssd, 7800x3d, 32gb ram and when downloading at 500MB/s the system works ridiculously slow

BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net · 2 days ago

Small problem with that line of thinking, though it is understandable, multitasking is smooth, unless there is a write IO operation, and the same is true for just running a single tab firefox or LyX (latex editor), so it’s probably not ram usage.

For this reason i disabled anything that might do writes in the background except for timeshift, and i saw massive improvements in responsiveness.

Thanks for your input, still.

I have a suspicion my machine might be waiting when it has write IO operations, because it doesn’t heat up or make any noise, I’ve been looking for a way to make a fake io operation or something like that, to confirm this.