[mythtv-users] Slightly OT: Moving from drive slowing down entire system

[jacob]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 09:07:04PM -0400, Ryan Steffes wrote:
> >
> >Actually, it's the cached speeds that looked odd to me, but that's mostly
> >because when I was googling around trying to find out why my machine was
> >locking up, I kept seeing people reporting speeds at twice what I've got.
> >
> >I just seem to have constant disk io issues that locked up or severely
> >slow down my computer with no apparent cause.  For example, right now, to
> >test the machine, I tried copying a few of the movies from the good drive 
> >to
> >the machine upstairs through nfs and the machine just hard locked.
> >
> >Ryan
> >
> 
> 
> Tried again, running top in another window, locked with this current status:
> 
> top - 21:05:46 up 6 min,  2 users,  load average: 7.62, 3.88, 1.59
...
> Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.3% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 99.3% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.3% si
...
> 
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+
> COMMAND
> 3160 root       5 -10     0    0    0 S  0.3  0.0   0:00.39ivtv-enc
...
>   63 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.77kswapd0

Welllll, I'd say, it looks like your PVR-x50 is currently enconding,
since I don't normally see the ivtv-enc thread using any CPU when it's
not, but that doesn't look like it's causing your big problem.

99.3% of you CPU is being used by a process (or processes) waiting on
some piece of hardware. Your swap thread is in a D(ead) state, and if
that's the problem, then the poor performance is understandable. You
might try a "ps aux | grep -w D" to see if any other processes are
waiting.

You can always power off, pull power from the "bad" disk, and power back
up, to ensure that's the real problem. If you're only seeing 3MB/s and
change access times, AND bad blocks on the disk, these kinds of problems
are certainly within the realm of the reasonable.

Jacob