Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 18 May 2007 12:46:32 +0300 | From | Heikki Orsila <> | Subject | Re: usb-storage nice value |
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On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 12:03:08PM +0200, DervishD wrote: > I'm having problems when reading/writing to external USB harddisks: > my *internal* harddisk stalls from time to time, so watching a movie > while copying data is a PITA (well, if the movie is bad, the leaps help > a bit...).
I've had a similar problem that is caused due to USB write caching. When a process rapidly writes to a USB device, the whole memory gets filled with write cache. When the memory is full of write cache for USB, it is very slow to get clean pages as the USB device is slow. This stalls the entire system performance. Using sync mount option for USB solves this problem, but decreases write performance significantly.
Would it be possible to limit per device write caching to N pages from userspace? Having just 128 MiB of write cache for a USB device would be sufficient for high performance, but yet have plenty of clean pages for other purposes.
-- Heikki Orsila Barbie's law: heikki.orsila@iki.fi "Math is hard, let's go shopping!" http://www.iki.fi/shd - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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