On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Q wrote:
> Sometimes I/O gets really slow when trying todo 2 I/O's.
>
> One example is that network stuff is really slow when burning a CD, it's
> almost impossible to do anything then.
>
> An other is that when a disk was turned down, and you try to access it,
> when it's spinning up, all other I/O stops for a few seconds.
>
> It's both time talking to an IDE interface that the rest slows down. Is
> this normal? Can there be done something about it?
This is an FAQ. There are a number of things that can be done
to solve this.
You can turn on DMA transfer for your IDE devices, or (if that
fails) use interrupt unmasking. You can tune this with hdparm(8).
The alternative is to buy decent hardware, but not everyone can
afford that. This is rumoured to be well worth the money...
Take for example my setup. I've got two absolutely crappy cpus
(pentium 120) on a worse mainboard (intel neptune), but a nice
SCSI controller, WDE 7200rpm hard disk, decent 4MB video card,
an above-average sound card and an excellent monitor.
The typical spending pattern at computer shops seems to be the
other way around. People invest half their money in a high-end
CPU (which will be outdated soon) and forget to spend money on
the rest of their computer.
The end result is (of course) a system where the CPU will be
dragged down whenever one of the peripherals needs to have something
done (because they're too stupid to do it themselves), taking
system performance down with it...
To this I say: "neener, neener, ..." (hey, it's weekend)
cheers,
Rik
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 15 2000 - 21:00:24 EST