slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Roberto Peon]

With an old, non-dma (by default, at least) drive I have under heavy IO, the
mouse moves in 1/4 screen increments, and so GUIs are not terribly useful (for
me) in this situation.

Personally, if I could have a hotkey that would attempt to restore activity,
the  behaviour of the hotkey would be to throttle down all currently running
processes to half their current IO and/or CPU maximum allocations for the next
X  (some reasonably long user time, but not too long) seconds. Pressing the key
again would again throttle processes down by half (down to some limit), and
reset the timer.

I.e. if a process was using 100% cpu, it would be limited to 50% for the next
10 seconds, and if it was reading/writing 10MB/s, it would be allowed to
read/write at 5MB/s for the next 10 secodns.

Of course, I'm not aware of a way to do this, but it seems like it would be a
fun kernel hack.

-Roberto JP

--- Michael Favia <michael.favia at insitesinc.com> wrote:

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> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On my IBM X31 laptop, the system entirely locks up when there's a lot of
> > disk access, some common situations are:
> >  - when getting heavily into swap due to a runaway process
> >  - when running rpm/yum
> > 
> > It's not *technically* locked up (i.e. if you wait long enough it will
> > come back) but in practice you have to reboot if a process has a memory
> > leak, and you can't do any work while running yum.
> 
> It is amazing what we are completely content putting up with until
> someone mentions they suffer from the same plight. I really like the
> idea of being able to launch "System Monitor" aka gnome-system-monitor
> (via hotkey) to graphically kill any runaway processes (or even just
> advise me as to which one is the culprit so i can make an informed
> decision). I don't know how to "force reserve" the resources to make it
> functional in such a situation but it would save tons of unfinished work
> (multitasking) that is being lost because of 1 wayward app.
> 
> - --
> Michael Favia            michael.favia at insitesinc.com
> Insites Incorporated    http://michael.insitesinc.com
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