In message <20021218071945.GF8176@bcd.geek.com.au>, Daniel Carosone writes:
>But the whole system did get very, very slow while writing out the
>data. A little like you describe - switching desktops and moving
>the mouse was laggy, and drawing held up.

*exactly* that.  And my X server isn't paged out at all, so it's not that X
is short of disk cycles.

>At the time, I put it down to something in the usb code -
>but perhaps it was somewhere else and the really slow disk
>highlighted the problems you're seeing?

Perhaps!

>It shows up as sd at umass, btw, so it's not wd specific in this
>case.

Unless it's the disk reads that were doing it?

-s