[ltp] Re: Periodic freeze

[Rolf Kutz]

On 25/07/12 23:16 -0700, John Magolske wrote:
>* Rolf Kutz <rk@vzsze.de> [120723 22:51]:
>> On 19/07/12 14:46 -0700, John Magolske wrote:
>> > After installing the liquorix kernel (optimized for the desktop and
>> > touted as providing snappier performance) I'm still experiencing
>> > these multi-second freezes. Even tried launching vim & mpd like so:
>> >
>> >   schedtool -R -p1 -n -19 -e vim
>>
>> Does this also happen with vim -n?
>
>I'm now experimenting with vim -n to turn off Vim's swap file -- it
>does seem to cut down on some of the smaller ~250ms hangups...hard
>to tell for sure. But the large multi-second freezes appear to be
>attributable to the hard drive spinning down:

If the drive spins down, vim hangs when writing
to it's swapfile.

>  # Should laptop mode tools control the hard drive power management settings?
>  # Set to 0 to disable
>  #CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT="auto"
>  CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT="0"
>
>But after setting that to "0" I found something else was spinning down
>the hard-drive on a regular basis while running on battery (but not
>while plugged into AC)... not sure what could be doing that. I didn't

Maybe a BIOS-setting? I'm not sure if that would
spin down the drive.

>> Does your system swap a lot?
>
>Since I'm rarely using more than 500MB of memory (maybe ~1GB max) and
>this machine has 3GB of RAM installed, I didn't bother setting up a
>swap partition & turning on swap. I had vm.swappiness=5, just now set
>it to 0. Could any of this be interacting with the freezing behavior?

Without swap vm.swappiness doesn't do anything,
afaik. A swap might help in you situation since it
can free some memory that is then used for
cache.

regards
Rolf

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