vuori@sci.fi (Valtteri Vuorikoski) writes:

>I've been running 3.0_BETA CVS'd Jun 30 on a P4 box with two PATA drives
>mirrored with raidframe. When doing disk io that involves heavy metadata
>operations, (ie. tar xzf pkgsrc.tar.gz) sometimes disk IO response gets
>extremely slow. It may take several minutes to do ls -l /usr/bin and
>another 30 seconds to get the prompt back once the listing is finished.

Yes, that's normal. The disks are almost only writing and there is
no memory for the filecache. But this was already the case for 2.0.

>Workaround seems to be to disable soft-deps. This makes file operations
>just plain slow, but system doesn't go into totally comatose states.

Without softdeps less data is buffered for writing, and it is difficult
to fill all the physical memory.


-- 
-- 
                                Michael van Elst
Internet: mlelstv@serpens.de
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."