20 Apr
2012
20 Apr
'12
5:42 a.m.
Problem as follows:
1) Plug in an external USB drive.
2) Mount it anywhere. Doesn't matter how.
3) Copy a few GB of data to the drive from a non-USB disk.
4) Watch the load average "climb" to 5.x, sometimes 10.x or more. Why? This on an otherwise unloaded system. Doesn't matter how many cores, how much RAM, 32/64 bit, etc.
Why should copying some files to a USB drive cause load averages to climb so high? (and network monitors to freak out?)