Badblocks impact on overall performance

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Sat, 3 Jan 1998 23:50:31 +0000 (GMT)


> When I do a badblocks -w on a reasonable size disk
> (I just put a 3gig scsi on my system), the system can
> go out to lunch for a few seconds (becomes very non-interactive).
>
> Does a badblocks effectively flush out the buffer cache?

No but two things occur which are bad

1. The request queue gets filled unfairly by the one task because
there's a lack of request fairness (its not normally an issue)

2. The queue fills and blocks other drivers up because Linus still
hasnt included the patch that was developed to keep a per
device queue (SCSI doesnt have this problem as it empties the
request queues onto its own queues), but stuff like IDE and
especially slower devices - eg floppies are dire for it.

(and yes Linus can we please have the multiple queues patch in
2.2 pending the new io_request stuff in 2.3...)

Alan