System slowdown on large disk writes

[John Van Ostrand]

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 19:27 -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> I have noticed that when doing huge IO operations I get a system
> slowdown until the operation finishes.  I don't notice unless the
> read/write (and it seems to have to be both) is really big, but it
> bothers me that it slows my whole machine down.  A great way for me to
> replicate it is to copy a DVD iso from one place to another (mv'ing it
> obviously doesn't demonstrate the behaviour at all.)  I seem to have DMA
> enabled, according to hdparm, so I'm curious as to what accounts for the
> behaviour, and what I can do about it.  Thanks.

What version of the kernel are you using and what distro?

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