Ubuntu 8.04, bad response time when HDD active

[Madison Kelly]

Hi all,

   I updated my Ubuntu 7.10 system to 8.04 and at first things were 
fine. Now though, my system stutters a LOT (like now, writing this, the 
text keeps coming in chunks rather than seeing the characters as I type 
them). I am not sure exactly why, as my memory isn't full (not 
swapping), my disk is running in DMA mode and no particular process is 
going nuts in 'top'.

   It seems to bog down when there is disk activity though and/or a 
download happening. I've also noticed that my disk went from being 
recognized as '/dev/sda' to '/dev/hda' again (something that changed a 
few versions back). I am not sure if this change coincided with my loss 
of performance though.

   Has anyone else had any troubles?

My machine is an IBM Thinkpad T40, 1.5GHz Pentium M (running at 1.5GHz), 
1GB RAM (45% in use atm) and a Seagate Momentus 5,400 RPM 60BG drive. 
While writing this email with a bittorrent running and not much else my 
load average is a very high 2.3. The stutter is so bad I can't listen to 
my music and even typing this is difficult. This machine *used* to be 
very fast by my humble standards until a few weeks ago.

Help!! :)

Madi

Some values:

root at akane:/home/digimer# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
  Timing cached reads:   384 MB in  2.00 seconds = 191.59 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:    6 MB in  3.23 seconds =   1.86 MB/sec

root at akane:/home/digimer# hdparm -I /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

ATA device, with non-removable media
	Model Number:       ST960822A
	Serial Number:      3LF255XE
	Firmware Revision:  3.02
Standards:
	Used: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2
	Supported: 6 5 4
Configuration:
	Logical		max	current
	cylinders	16383	16383
	heads		16	16
	sectors/track	63	63
	--
	CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
	LBA    user addressable sectors:  117210240
	device size with M = 1024*1024:       57231 MBytes
	device size with M = 1000*1000:       60011 MBytes (60 GB)
Capabilities:
	LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
	Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, no device specific minimum
	R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16	Current = ?
	Advanced power management level: 128
	Recommended acoustic management value: 254, current value: 0
	DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
	     Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
	PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
	     Cycle time: no flow control=240ns  IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
	Enabled	Supported:
	   *	SMART feature set
	    	Security Mode feature set
	   *	Power Management feature set
	   *	Write cache
	   *	Look-ahead
	   *	Host Protected Area feature set
	   *	WRITE_BUFFER command
	   *	READ_BUFFER command
	   *	DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
	   *	Advanced Power Management feature set
	    	SET_MAX security extension
	   *	Device Configuration Overlay feature set
	   *	Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
	   *	SMART error logging
	   *	SMART self-test
	   *	IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
Security:
	Master password revision code = 65534
		supported
	not	enabled
	not	locked
		frozen
	not	expired: security count
	not	supported: enhanced erase
HW reset results:
	CBLID- above Vih
	Device num = 0 determined by CSEL
Checksum: correct

top - 11:09:18 up  1:28,  4 users,  load average: 2.29, 1.60, 1.07
Mem:   1294884k total,  1266912k used,    27972k free,    80500k buffers
Swap:   979924k total,        0k used,   979924k free,   608460k cached

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  SHR S %CPU  RES %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND 

    41 root      15  -5     0    0 S 14.0    0  0.0   0:27.80 kblockd/0 

  5409 root      20   0  3420 1004 S  4.0 1156  0.1   0:03.62 
hald-addon-stor 

  6087 digimer   20   0  176m  22m S  4.0  68m  5.5   0:47.05 
thunderbird-bin 

  5495 root      20   0  135m  10m S  2.7  45m  3.6   3:35.29 Xorg 

  8238 digimer   20   0 46268 4988 R  2.3 7216  0.6   0:31.00 xmms 

  8172 digimer   20   0 77884  14m S  1.7  27m  2.2   0:29.96 
/usr/bin/gnome- 

  4916 root      20   0  4368 1476 S  1.3 1960  0.2   0:00.96 openvpn 

  5378 root      20   0  3416 1012 S  1.3 1160  0.1   0:04.18 
hald-addon-inpu 

     4 root      15  -5     0    0 S  0.7    0  0.0   0:01.68 
ksoftirqd/0 

  2390 root      15  -5     0    0 S  0.7    0  0.0   0:27.86 kjournald 

  5094 root      20   0 18380  756 S  0.7  932  0.1   0:10.42 cpufreqd 

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists