Re: [CentOS] lots of disk activity keep process from responding

On 6/20/11, Jerry Geis geisj@pagestation.com wrote:

I have noticed that only around the 4am-4:15 time frame when the trim is happening does my other process log connection attempts but my process (forking and opening databases) is not responding in time to give data back to the connecting process. Not critically important as it just tries again and all ok...

I was having similar problems with a script crawling through thousands of small files. As suggested by others here, using ionice appeared to have made a world of difference.

On top of that, since it's your own script and since speed isn't critical, you could insert breaks after every x files to allow other processes time to run.