Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

Hi, my question is in the title: why does heavy io on the emmc murder the responsiveness of the phone? For example if you download a torrent on mydocs, the phone is basically unusable until it's done or you remove the battery to tunr it off. Or when apt- is updating, the phone is unusable there too....
I have this old piii 700mhz with 192mb of ram running ubuntu 6.10 and i could be torrenting and copying files and generally hammering the hard drive without the thing looking like it just froze... What gives?

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

This topic has been discussed in detail, along with several possible solutions in quite a few threads. Search is your friend.

Start here.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...highlight=tune

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

I hated it when it just froze when copying lots of files between mmc and emmc or restoring backups. Installed http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=69973 and it hasn't completely frozen since.

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

Performance does not solely rely on clock speed, especially for multi-tasking system. ARM is designed for low-power devices such that throttling mechanisms are in place to minimize power consumption. The system would run at much less optimal performance at high load.

Also, in a multi-tasking environment, fast switching memory and swap space is required. The serializing nature of flash memory is especially bad for mulit-tasking under high load for normal cpu-bound tasks, least i/o bound tasks.

So, don't push your N900 too hard. ;)

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

my N900 reboots sometimes due to heavy IO, it's really annoying, it corrupted an easy debian image and did other bad stuff

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

IIRC your N900 is new and that shouldn't be normal. Do you have SmartReflex on?

1=on, 0=off

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

yeah I've had it with 2 different devices, both would do it anyway weither smartreflex was on or off

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

I think there is something terrible wrong with Linux but the problem with all this tweaks and patches is that this device is using vfat for disks and the vfat driver is extremely buggy. You want to repartition the device with ext3.

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

I'd avoid turning them on in any circumstance.

BTW, you'd like to try disable off mode to see if it helps in your case:

Re: Why does heavy io kills the device?
 

Are you serious? You can tell her to switch on R&D mode and switch off watchdog, too. It has the same effect.