[Mageia-dev] Fwd: Re: [Cooker] System can stall under heavy IOs with slow storage devices

[Frank Griffin]

I've been noticing this symptom for a while now especially when running 
programs that copy large files using large buffer sizes.  It's worse 
than just firefox, as the entire desktop will freeze for minutes at a time.

This change/workaround cleared this up entirely for me.  If we haven't 
incorporated this yet, we should consider doing so.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Cooker] System can stall under heavy IOs with slow 
storage devices
Date: 	Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:36:02 +0100
From: 	Florian Hubold <doktor5000 at arcor.de>
Reply-To: 	cooker at mandrivalinux.org
To: 	cooker at mandrivalinux.org



Am 19.12.2011 10:26, schrieb Franck Bui:
>  Hello,
>
>  I've noticed a regression on my system which can stall some applications
>  (most notably firefox) during very very long time (>  10 mins).
Man, you're my hero, trying to find out what causes this since some months now.
At least two thumbs up! :)
>  It's apparently related to transparent huge pages and I found that it
>  had already been described by LWN here a month ago:
>  http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/.
>
>  Unlike what it's stated in the article, the regression is not really
>  hard to trigger in my case: just plug a USB stick, copy on it a big
>  file, then try to use firefox...
>
>  To fix this, simply try to disable THP:
>
>    echo madvise>/sys/kernel/mm//transparent_hugepage/enabled
>
>  and firefox should work as expected now.
>
>  So, if no one objects, the plan is to simply default the THP stuff to
>  "madvise" for desktop flavour where an application has to ask
>  explicitly huge page otherwise it will be disabled.
>


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