Disk scheduling to improve desktop responsiveness

bsduck

Hello,

I just unpacked pkgsrc.tar.xz and noticed that this process makes the desktop almost unresponsive. This must be related to disk access, because CPU load stays quite low. It isn't really convenient: I'd typically like to do other things at the computer and have the decompression run in background without bothering me. Is it possible to configure the system to get a somewhat more fair disk scheduling among processes, instead of giving one process almost monopolistic access to the disk and letting others wait for a long time?

Jay

bsduck tried with CVS ?

rvp

bsduck I just unpacked the same file on 9.2_STABLE and didn't notice any unresponsiveness (apart from taking nore than 5 mins. to unpack the whole thing).

Describe your setup: filesystem (+logging?), term emulator, desktop (+compositing?), Xorg, ...

Jay tried with CVS ?

CVS!? CVS!!? 🤣 😄 😐 🙁 😡 No!
(CVS would be out of the frying pan and into the fire.)

bsduck

Not yet, but that's only an alternative for this specific usecase anyway. I'd be interested in a general setting which prevents tasks such as unpacking big archives to monopolise system resources.

bsduck

nia systat(1)

Thank you, I didn't know that utility.

I tried again and kept an eye on htop and systat. As I expected, nothing special to see: disk activity is high (of course), CPU and RAM usage still quite low (I have a reasonably powerful i7 and 16GB RAM) and no swap is used at all.

rvp Describe your setup

FFSv2 with log enabled, on a HDD.
LXQt desktop with openbox WM and picom compositor.
Xorg using intel driver in UXA acceleration mode.

What I'm experiencing is not a complete freeze, but rather files and programs taking ages to open or save, Firefox becoming unresponsive, etc., things which should not happen on a machine with comfortable system ressources.

nia

It's not necessarily disk performance, system time might be high. xz can use a lot of memory for decompression too (gzip is better in this department), and what you describe sounds a lot like swapping. You should be able to monitor disk and CPU load at the same time with the :iostat page in systat(1).

rvp

bsduck FFSv2 with log enabled, on a HDD.
LXQt desktop with openbox WM and picom compositor.
Xorg using intel driver in UXA acceleration mode.

Tried that same setup on my old Core-i3 1.8 GHz laptop (4GB RAM; -32MB for graphics).

The first test with picom locked up system playing YT videos, so retried without it.

No issues watching 720p YT vids in Firefox while doing tar -xf pkgsrc.tar.xz; rm -rf pkgsrc repeatedly in a terminal.

While this was going on, built tools and kernel. Slight unresponsiveness this time around; then intermittent freezes while the kernel is busy swallowing up 1GB of swap. Once the kernel has got the correct working set, the only lags are firefox occasionally dropping frames because the compilation is going full-bore with make -j6.

Are you running estd or some other CPU-throttler?
Post your /var/run/dmesg.out & Xorg.log file.