mlelstv@serpens.de (Michael van Elst) writes:

> 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.

I don't remember the effect being quite as severe on 2.0; maybe I just
haven't tried the quite the same things.

While I can see the mechanism behind it, the near-complete-hanging of
the system is not a very pleasant experience.

 -valtteri