stalls caused by USB drive copy [LWN.net]

stalls caused by USB drive copy

Posted Jan 13, 2013 1:59 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: stalls caused by USB drive copy by cmccabe
Parent article: Per-entity load tracking

if, as nybble41 stated above, vm.dirty_bytes really works, the blame is in the kernel that has a bad default (10% of all RAM) because RAM is cheaper nowadays, but not proportionally faster to access. It causes contention of the cleaning the dirty pages somehow. "cp" just happens to trigger this bug. For information, I can trigger this bug by copying anything (it does not seem to be necessary to be a single file, but a single file happens to trigger it more aggressively apparently) above 1/2 GiB via USB.
Trying to backup my VMs (20G each file) to a USB drive is a nightmare. Usually I do "nice -20 cp" or, more commonly, "kde-cp".

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stalls caused by USB drive copy

Posted Apr 11, 2013 20:28 UTC (Thu) by serzan (subscriber, #8155) [Link]

> Usually I do "nice -20 cp" or, more commonly, "kde-cp".

have you tried ionice -c 3? though not sure it'd have much of an impact, if thrashing memory is the cause