[plug] No net traffic with heavy IDE usage

Bill Kenworthy billk at iinet.net.au
Sat Apr 21 16:55:37 WST 2001


Both cdrom and harddrive are on the same IDE bus? and the driver has
defaulted to the lowest settings?  try hdparm (set dma mode etc) and get
another cable and separate the drives onto different busses.  In some
cases, everything will stop whilst waiting for disks - particularly when
the cdrom is hogging the bus.  A similar effect occurs if you have a
harddrive sharing a bus and using cdparanoia to rip poor quality tracks
- basicly it gets unusable for the duration!  As for the difference
between Redhat and debian, its possibly the default driver settings,
hdparm will help if that is the case.  Otherwise get a real distro like
Mandrake that applies the optimisations out of the box (runs for cover
...)

BillK

Nigel Duff wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> When i'm burning a CD (reading from or writing to), the hard drive is
> thrashing under swap or just generally with heavy disk usage, all
> internet traffic stops until there is a pause in disk usage. I've been
> running Debian (unstable) for about a year now, pretty sure it didn't
> happen under Redhat 5.2/6.0.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas what might cause this?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Nigel



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