stalls caused by USB drive copy

Posted Jan 13, 2013 0:22 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: stalls caused by USB drive copy by man_ls
Parent article: Per-entity load tracking

As I'm hardly an expert, take this with a grain of salt, but I put this line in /etc/sysctl.conf (or /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf):

vm.dirty_bytes = 201326592

This limits total dirty memory to 192MB before the kernel forces processes to work on writing data to disk rather than dirtying new pages. The default is something like 10% of total RAM. It seems to help.