[CentOS] Very slow on I/O?

Mon Aug 21 22:41:56 UTC 2006
David King <dking at ketralnis.com>

Just one more piece of information: a simple recompile isn't what has  
fixed the problem every time, the recompile has involved an upgrade  
to 2.6.16 as well

On 21 Aug 2006, at 15:06, David King wrote:

> I seem to be having a problem with CentOS releases 4.2 and 4.3. On  
> a fresh install (on two very different pieces of hardware, one Dell  
> PowerEdge server and one Compaq Presario), the system seems to be  
> extremely slow. It happens primarily during any hard disk I/O.
>
> It's slow enough that my mouse skips slowly instead of moving  
> smoothly, and I am unable to type. It seems to freeze for  
> milliseconds at a time, which makes typing difficult because while  
> it is frozen it seems to not accept keystrokes (that is, if I type  
> the letter 'f' twelve times, only four of them may appear,  
> depending on timing). It may be unrelated, but the clock seems to  
> go more slowly during I/O as well (i.e. during times of I/O the  
> clock runs behind more and more). If I were to extract a large  
> tarball, I would have to wait for the while thing to finish before  
> I could interact with the system at all
>
> A simple recompile of the kernel from kernel.org sources (which, as  
> you can imagine, takes quite a long time) fixes the problem  
> entirely, though. So is there something that differs wildly  
> regarding the I/O scheduler between the stock CentOS kernel and the  
> stock kernel from kernel.org?
>
> It would really be more convenient to be able to keep our kernel up- 
> to-date automatically using the built-in packaging tools, so I hope  
> that someone has seen the problem and has a work-around
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--
David King
Computer Programmer
Ketralnis Systems