System appears sleepy with disk activity

[jackburton]

While doing a svn checkout of the haiku repository on my system (an intel core 2 DUO, with a core disabled due to ticket #2803), the system appears cyclically aslept: if I try to open a tracker window, it takes a couple of seconds to open, but this seems to happen cyclically, as I said. The cpu activity is low with some very occasional spikes, so it doesn't seem related to the above ticket. Top doesn't help much, althought it shows more or less the following pattern: svn spends a lot of time in kernel (while downloading the files), then it stops downloading for a while, and the thread "scsi scheduler" is the one which consumes most cpu (but never above 10% in that case), I guess while updating the svn database, and during that time, it seems like it blocks any other operation from/to disk.

[jackburton]

Looks like it's also reproducible by just copying a directory with many files (the haiku local repository, for example). Also with both cores enabled.

[jackburton]

This seems to have been fixed after Ingo's latest changes to the vm system.

[Adek336]

Disk activity makes Haiku unresponsive; after you click on a, for example, menu, you have to wait many seconds before the menu shows up.

Note ​http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/IO-scheduler-regression

Responsiveness is pretty important for the user experience.

[Adek336]

*open big image with ShowImage - makes Haiku unresponsive; *select a fragment of the image, drag it a little bit, select another fragment, something like this often make Haiku unresponsive as well

I'm not sure if this is caused by the same bug.

[Adek336]

Also slow is:

• browsing the directory structure of the file system in the directory chooser of Expander while checking out sources with subversion.

[Adek336]

Also note #2604.

[diver]

This one is probably fixed now?

[jackburton]

Probably fixed in the meantime: I don't have that machine anymore, but can't see this problem on any machine I tried.