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 --------
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.
>