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genderbee
Asked: 2020-03-10 10:43:32 +0800 CST

OS is terribly slow when copy or tar/untar files

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Is possible to setup CPU load or RAM for better multitasking? Because when I for example copy files or tar/untar some bigger file, OS is terribly slow due this operation.

Thanks.

OS Ubuntu 18.04.

HW CPU i7, 8GB RAM, SSD.

Update

When tar zxvf SOME_BIG_FILE.tar.gz (file about 3GB), due this process is not possible to work, switching between windows with ALT+TAB takes 2 seconds, keyboard and mouse get stucked in 5 seconds interval.

CPU is not so high (sometimes some process takes me more and all is ok).

Tasks: 303 total,   1 running, 251 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 20,2 us,  5,8 sy,  0,0 ni, 64,8 id,  7,2 wa,  0,0 hi,  1,9 si,  0,0 st
KiB Mem :  8031476 total,   174684 free,  6087096 used,  1769696 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  3906556 total,  2917856 free,   988700 used.  1113008 avail Mem 

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                                                         
 6916 hosek     20   0    4912    840    776 D  82,4  0,0   0:17.75 gzip                                                                                                                                            
 6915 hosek     20   0   42152   3536   3256 S  13,6  0,0   0:03.24 tar                                                                                                                                             
  148 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   4,7  0,0   7:44.14 kswapd0                                                                                                                                         
 6917 root      20   0       0      0      0 D   2,3  0,0   0:00.12 kworker/u8:3+fl                                                                                                                                 
 1964 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   1,3  0,0   0:08.80 kworker/1:1H-kb

And memory seems OK too.

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8031476     6026968      169716      540912     1834792     1103756
Swap:       3906556      927004     2979552

I suppose this is some disk process related? Or how can I find out brownie?

cpu ram

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It seems you have disk IO priority issue.

    You could specify lowest priority for processes which perform disk operations.

    ionice -c 3 tar zxvf SOME_BIG_FILE.tar.gz

    From man ionice:

    ionice [-c class] [-n level] [-t] command [argument...]


OPTIONS
       -c, --class class
              Specify the name or number of the scheduling class to use; 0 for none, 1 for realtime, 2 for best-effort, 3 for idle.

    Another possible solution is to use lowlatency kernel, which will make more resource intensive operations slower, but will improve responsiveness. Reference.

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