Disk writes cause other applications to hang
Disk writes cause other applications to hang
I've set up an old laptop with Linux mint some months ago, and while the laptop's speed is fine when there are no disk write, even a very small write can cause other applications to hang until it is done, and i can also tell because i have an IO led so whenever it is on i know that i can't really interact with stuff whenever it's on.
SMART status doesn't seem to report anything, (tested some weeks ago, but issue was always present), but i'm willing to test again and show screenshots.
I'll show some maybe relevant information, note that my Linux fs is mounted on sda7.
some forums online suggested looking at /etc/fstab:
the following is an output of sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda7:
here is my system information:
If there is anything else that is relevant, I'd like to know, and thanks for any help.
A 5400rpm drive is pretty slow, especially if you are comparing it to a SSD, and at 17% free you are nearing the point where file fragmentation and seek time become real I/O bottlenecks if you have an application trying to read data while you are doing a write. I haven't willingly used a 5400rpm drive in over 20 years, but I remember violently hating them.
That being said, I'm definitely not an expert here, so I'll be curious what others have to say.
I was told this laptop is about 10 years old, and I've got it from someone who is 23 years old, so i don't doubt what i was told about it.
So it should be very suspicious that it is that slow, and also, i can usually multitask pretty well with it, so it is very surprising that it hangs like that.
I really hope i get help troubleshooting this because i have a feeling it shouldn't be this bad.
I should probably check defragging options on linux regardless, thank you for the time you took answering this :)
Defragging used to be necessary maintenance back in the day but I think ext4 generally handles it well and does defragging in the background automatically. But fragmentation can exist temporarily which is the only reason I brought it up.
Multitasking performance is generally a factor of system memory which at 8GB is pretty reasonable for Linux. Once you exceed that, you'll use that swap file which I would expect would incur the same performance issues.
Update: ran e4defrag check, said no defragmentation necessary, all scores were low.