[Mageia-dev] Fwd: Re: [Cooker] System can stall under heavy IOs with slow storage devices

Tue Dec 20 13:26:19 CET 2011

I've been noticing this symptom for a while now especially when running 
+programs that copy large files using large buffer sizes.  It's worse 
+than just firefox, as the entire desktop will freeze for minutes at a time.
+
+This change/workaround cleared this up entirely for me.  If we haven't 
+incorporated this yet, we should consider doing so.
+
+-------- Original Message --------
+Subject: 	Re: [Cooker] System can stall under heavy IOs with slow 
+storage devices
+Date: 	Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:36:02 +0100
+From: 	Florian Hubold <doktor5000 at arcor.de>
+Reply-To: 	cooker at mandrivalinux.org
+To: 	cooker at mandrivalinux.org
+
+
+
+Am 19.12.2011 10:26, schrieb Franck Bui:
+>  Hello,
+>
+>  I've noticed a regression on my system which can stall some applications
+>  (most notably firefox) during very very long time (>  10 mins).
+Man, you're my hero, trying to find out what causes this since some months now.
+At least two thumbs up! :)
+>  It's apparently related to transparent huge pages and I found that it
+>  had already been described by LWN here a month ago:
+>  http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/.
+>
+>  Unlike what it's stated in the article, the regression is not really
+>  hard to trigger in my case: just plug a USB stick, copy on it a big
+>  file, then try to use firefox...
+>
+>  To fix this, simply try to disable THP:
+>
+>    echo madvise>/sys/kernel/mm//transparent_hugepage/enabled
+>
+>  and firefox should work as expected now.
+>
+>  So, if no one objects, the plan is to simply default the THP stuff to
+>  "madvise" for desktop flavour where an application has to ask
+>  explicitly huge page otherwise it will be disabled.
+>
+
+
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