Re: intermitent mouse pausing

rbiltz@yahoo.com adjusted his/her tinfoil beanie and donned asbestos
underwear to post:

> I have a really annoying problem. I have suse 9.2 pro on a Sun
w2100z
> with the fx3000 NVidia card. I use the default KDE desktop. I
noticed
> right away that there is a very short but noticeable pause in the
> system
> every 5 seconds or so. The pause occurs in everything from typing
to
> mouse movement to video rendering. I also noticed that it coincides

> with
> the hard drive activity. I can hear the hard drive being accessed
for
> a fraction of a second exactly the same time the pause occurs.
>
> I have suse loaded on 2 systems now and the result is the same. On
my
> second machine I wanted to see if the preinstalled Java Desktop
System
> that Sun provides (stripped down suse with a gnome clone xwindow)
has
> the
> same "tick" but it doesn't. As soon as I installed Suse 9.2
> regardless which Xwindow system I use (KDE, open desktop..etc) the
> same annoying "tick" is there.
>
> I've tried researching this on the net and I haven't come across
> anything
> about it. Can someone please tell me where this may be coming from> and how I can fix it??? Thanks.
>
> -ryan

This is caused by the dirty disk cache being flushed back to disk
every
5 seconds by default, it has been this way for quite a while now in
Suse, it is easy to change the delay but I would not recommend makingthe delay any higher than 1 minute otherwise you stand to lose data if

there is a crash or power outage.

You just need to add a line in /etc/init.d/boot.local on these lines:
echo 50 500 0 0 6000 6000 60 20 0
> /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

That should all be on one line making sure that there is a space
between
the last 0 and the >, the setting you are actually altering is the 2
6000`s by default they are 300 which in centisecs is 5 seconds so 6000

= 1 minute.

Now why you should be seeing a flicker though suggests you do not have

DMA enabled on the drive, you should not get any interference no
matter
what the timing is if your drive has DMA set to ON.

HTH

--
Mark
Novell Support Forums SysOp
Twixt hill and high water
N. Wales, UK.
Skype <my nick> text only please