portia

Hi,

I don't know if that's the right section of the forum.
While I'm copying big files (or a lot of files) the system gets so slow that it's hardly usable. It's a modern laptop with 3GB of RAM. I'm using Slackware 13.
Something must be wrong with my system.
Thanks for any help

tpl

try putting the copy down a little: use "nice"

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coopstah13

Probably what is happening is you have maxed out your disk transfer and anything else you try to access from disk will subsequently be slowed severely.

portia

Thanks for your replies.
If that's the maximum my system can reach, fine. I'll have to decrease the priority of copy using nice. I don't mind if it copies slower, as long as I can do other things in the meantime.
I've heard about 'nice' before, I'll need to google some info about it.

coopstah13

You can see if you are IO bound fairly simply.
Open a terminal and execute iostat -d -x 5 and watch output while running your copy. You can also use vmstat 5 and watch the last column, this is iowait time.

Rubberman

The same thing happens on my Linux systems when I copy big files around. It basically becomes I/O bound. I have a CentOS 5.4 system with 10 sata drives installed (about 10TB total) and this happens to me when I'm copying a bunch of big files (DVD ISO images for example) as well. I'm not sure there's much you can do about that. I find that if I do the copy externally from the GUI, such as using cp/mv from a command line, that the impact isn't as severe as doing it from the GUI file manager such as konqueror (KDE), so it might not just be an I/O situation as overloading the GUI subsystem as well. FWIW, I have an 8 core system with 8GB RAM and both internal SATA controller as well as a PCI-X esata controller, and neither the CPU nor the RAM are overloaded in these cases. The data moves at maximum disc speed in any case.

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