maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Why does heavy io kills the device?

9000	2011-03-30 , 07:02
Posts: 1,425 \| Thanked: 983 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Hong Kong	#4

Originally Posted by Ayle

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?

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.

Quote & Reply |