Re: high load on heavy disk i/o (fwd)

Ronald Wahl (rwahl@gmx.net)
Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:23:10 +0200 (CEST)


Maybe its not scsi related - so i repost this here...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 03:47:45 +0200 (CEST)
From: Ronald Wahl <rwahl@gmx.net>
To: linux-scsi <linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Re: high load on heavy disk i/o

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Ronald Wahl wrote:

> Hi,
>
> after installing a new disk (IBM DNES-309170W U2W SE/LVD - was cheaper
> than the UW model :-) on my SYMBIOS Controller (sym53c875 rev. 4). I
> noticed that during heavy disk i/o (e.g. creating a cdrom image or doing
> "cat /dev/zero > some_file") the load goes up to 3 or more and the system
> becomes totally unusable. Mostly all programs called during this time
> starting after the i/o load is gone. First I thought it was the cable
> length since it was 2m in length and ultra scsi spec doesn't allow greater
> than 1.5m in my case. Both ends are are terminated (active). I even had
> some wrong data during transfer (but very seldom). So I shorted my narrow
> cable to fit the spec. But at least the problem with the heavy load and
> system unusability is still there. Without this new disk I had no such
> problems. What's the problem here?
> <...>

The following may be relevant: mke2fs created most of my partions with a
blocksize of 4096 bytes (which seems to speed things greatly up!). Maybe
the driver has a problem with this greater blocks. I have similar
problems (high load, system unusable) with my MO drive which uses 2048
byte blocks (even under 2.0.36 this was a problem).

ron

-- 
/\/\  Ronald Wahl -- rwahl@gmx.net     /\/\          C S N           /\/\
\/\/  -------------------------------  \/\/  ----------------------  \/\/
/\/\  http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~row/  /\/\  network administration  /\/\
\/\/  PGP key available                \/\/    system  management    \/\/

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/