Re: [CentOS] slugishness

on 7-3-2009 5:30 AM Jerry Geis spake the following:

Hi all,

I have a 3G AM2 quad core CPU... x86_64 centos 5.3

When I am doing backing up to my external USB drive my system becomes sluggish. Clicking on a thunderbird compose takes some time to pop up the window. Typing doesn't keep up etc...

Is there something I can change so this backup doesn't slow my system down so much? I don't see HOW it can be taking so much CPU. top at times shows 0 idle or 11% idle from a USB backup.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Jerry

USB I believe is not a DMA based port, so the processor has to do a lot of work, especially at higher speeds. Rsync can also be a resource hog, as it keeps most of the hash tables in memory it uses to compare files with.