I have been having problems for the past few months where when I'm doing moderately disk intensive activities (such as downloading a git tree, using a virtual machine), I will get 1-2min periods where basically nothing can access the disk. By watching /proc/meminfo, I can see my dirty memory gradually growing during these disk intensive activities until it gets very large (several 100MB), then my system will be unresponsive until it all goes through writeback. This same behavior can be reproduced by manually running "sync" when the dirty memory is fairly large. Has anyone else experienced these problems? I noticed that some major changes were made to how Reiser4 uses dirty memory (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/2/13/106). I believe I started seeing this problem around that time. Could that have caused it? (Sorry for my vague and probably inaccurate description of the problem; I know very little about virtual memory and file systems). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe reiserfs-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
