F15 copy to usb hogs the PC

marvin_ita · #1 6th August 2011, 12:24 PM

Don't know how to report to bugzilla, but first of all I want to know if it's only my PC or if you have this problem too.
Today I started copy a 1.4 GByte from an internal disk (NTFS formatted) to a USB stick. The process is extremely slow (but this isn't a news, it always was with previous Fedora versions), in the meanwhile I tried to start Firefox and I found that it doesn't start: from KDE system monitor I see that Firefox starts loading but it blocks in "waiting for disk". Tried with some other program (Ksnapshot, Filezilla) and they're also extremely slow in loading when copy is active.
When putting the copy process in pause, after some time programs starts opening.

Anyone can confirm if this problem isn't only mine?

jpollard · #2 6th August 2011, 01:19 PM

It isn't just you. There are some other threads that have said the same thing.

Now, note: NTFS is a really poor use of the disk. It inherently has between two and three times the latency because it is not a kernel level filesystem. This affects how system buffers are used, which in turn, affects how memory is allocated. Memory allocated to ntfs is not globally managed, and that can easily impact other processes. A 64bit system with more than 4GB of memory will help here.

If you have multiple cores, it will perform better - but F15 has at least two inherently CPU bound processes (Mutter and systemd/dbus), so any single core system is bound to run out of available time and memory.

Without more information on your specific system, not much more than vague/overgeneralized opinion (such as above :-) can really be given.

marvin_ita · #3 6th August 2011, 03:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpollard

Without more information on your specific system, not much more than vague/overgeneralized opinion (such as above :-) can really be given.

I have F15 64bit on a AMD Phenom II 965BE and 4 GByte RAM... I use gkrellm to monitor CPU % and memory, but I cannot see any CPU core overloaded or any strange memory occupation during copy process.

I use NTFS only to share files with another windows partition... I will try if I get the same issue copying from EXT4 to usb drive and I will post here the result.

@is977: bug 12309 of what? In redhat bugzilla I don't find anything related my problem.

is977 · #4 6th August 2011, 02:38 PM

Congratulations! You have 12309 bug

jpollard · #5 6th August 2011, 08:01 PM

All of the user based monitoring tools cannot see any process that has a higher priority than they do.

Now strange memory occupation is only sort of visible. One aspect of the problem will show up as a very small resident usage (RES in top) with a very large virtual (VIRT) - the problem may be in the page fault rate which isn't shown

#12309 is not a filed bug. He is just saying you have found yet another bug.

marvin_ita · #6 7th August 2011, 10:06 AM

I tried copying the file from ntfs to ext4 internal drive, no problem. However if I copy from the ext4 internal drive to USB it behave in the same slow manner, so it isn't a ntfs bottleneck.
I added my note to bug #639462 but I have poor confidence that anyone is going to take care of that (tagged as 'urgent' but no maintainer started to look in it since was opened in 2010).