Hi,
I have a problem with copying files (OK, it’s my complete home folder for backup) to my external harddisk in Opensuse 12.3. When I’am copying many GBs, the computer is getting slower and slower and is getting less and less operable (ending up in nothing is working anymore with one exception: the copying process).
The computer is an ASUS UX31A (with 256 GB SSD) and the external harddisk is a USB2.0 1 TB Samsung 2.5’ disk connected to the USB3.0 port. I have a 2 GB swap partition.
This problem did not occur in Opensuse 12.2 (same hardware…).
Does anybody else recognise a drastic performance breakdown when copying big data amounts (e.g. backup)?
Michael
I have not copied enough to notice that. I normally compress while copying (I use “dar”) and that might slow down the data transfer.
When directly copying an “iso” (a DVD image) to an external drive, I do notice lots of CPU use. That seems to be because the external drive is NTFS. A drive formatted as ext2 or ext4 (or even FAT) does not load the processor as much.
I have not noticed a difference between opensuse 12.2 and 12.3, but perhaps I have not done a lot of copying yet with 12.3.
On 2013-05-13 20:16, michaelhust wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a problem with copying files (OK, it’s my complete home folder
> for backup) to my external harddisk in Opensuse 12.3. When I’am copying
> many GBs, the computer is getting slower and slower and is getting less
> and less operable (ending up in nothing is working anymore with one
> exception: the copying process).
> The computer is an ASUS UX31A (with 256 GB SSD) and the external
> harddisk is a USB2.0 1 TB Samsung 2.5’ disk connected to the USB3.0
> port. I have a 2 GB swap partition.
But you are not saying what software is doing the copy. That’s important.
The external disk is usb2, yet you say you connect it to the usb3 port -
why?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Sorry for the missing details:
The external USB harddisk is ext4 formated.
I’am copying the complete /home to the external drive using dolphin (no extra copy program, backup system…).
I have only USB3 ports ;-).
Michael
On 2013-05-14 21:26, michaelhust wrote:
>
> Sorry for the missing details:
> The external USB harddisk is ext4 formated.
> I’am copying the complete /home to the external drive using dolphin (no
> extra copy program, backup system…).
Ok. Then I would try a different program, to find out if the problem is
the program or something deeper. I would open a terminal (xterm,
konsole, whatever), and run “mc” in it (you probably will have to
install it first). It is a text mode file browser, very powerful, that
imitates the classic Midnight Commander of old MsDos. It has menus and
responds to the mouse while used in graphical mode.
And it is usually fast.
If you see the same problem as with dolphin, then the problem is deeper.
> I have only USB3 ports ;-).
Heh! How things advance. I have none. :-}
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
I copied my home folder with MC. This was working well. The computer was not “paralysed” ;).
Here, I copied the data on an other external drive (USB2, 500GB, Samsung).
I will try MC also with the other 1TB external drive used before to ensure, that this is not a problem with the individual external 1TB drive.
Michael
I have also observed a significant slow down with a 64-bit openSUSE-12.3 KDE install on an Intel Core i7-920 (with 6GB RAM) when copying a MASSIVE amount of data from one external USB-3.0 drive (connected to USB-3.0 port) to another external USB-3.0 drive (connected to a USB-2.0 port). The amount of data was approximately 800 GBytes and the slow down only noticeable after about ~70 GBytes (estimate on my part - I was not paying attention earlier) copied after which the slow down gradually got worse and worse. I can not say (due to a lack of experience with such copies) as to whether the actual copy speed was reasonable, but I suspect it was. It took ~ 7 hours to do this copy of the 800 GBytes, but I think given an average copy speed of 30MB/sec, that may be reasonable. [ie 800GB / 30 MB/sec = ~ 7+ hrs].
X was inapplicably using about 95% of the 1 core (of the 8 virtual cores). Nominally X is around 15% or less. The only thing X was doing was updating the status in the lower right KDE window as to the copy progress (and the occasional firefox surf/web page entry). Memory consumption was almost negligble.
It would be an exaggeration to say the PC was not useable, but it did have performance comparible to my ancient 32-bit Athlon-1150 PC (w/2GB RAM) that is running LXDE. ie this was not Intel Core i7 performance and I would rather wildly speculate that there is something non-optimal wrt the USB driver I/O hander’s impact on the kernel processing of other tasks ?
I can not say whether the same exists on a previous openSUSE version as I do not nominally copy more than 5 GB at a time.
I should add that one of these External hard drives I used for this massive copy previously had had a problem when it physically fell 2 feet, about 2 months ago < gulp > and I damaged the content of the file partitioning (I recovered all data, thou, with TestDisk) as a result of the cable being jerked out in the middle of a large data transfer. I did not observe any physical damage. That same hard drive was restored to functionality by removing all partitions and reformatting with gparted. This 800GB copy is my first use of it since. So its possible that external hard drive having a previous user induced failure is a factor in this.
On 2013-05-31 17:26, oldcpu wrote:
>
> oldcpu;2561657 Wrote:
>> I have also observed a significant slow down with a 64-bit openSUSE-12.3
>> KDE install on an Intel Core i7-920 (with 6GB RAM) when copying a
>> MASSIVE amount of data from one external USB-3.0 drive (connected to
>> USB-3.0 port) to another external USB-3.0 drive (connected to a USB-2.0
>> port).
If something in the program that does the copy uses a library function
(a guess) in X that loads it extremely, then anything that uses X would
be slow as well. The entire computer would feel slow, but perhaps it is
only the graphical session.
This does not happen with ‘mc’.
> I should add that one of these External hard drives I used for this
> massive copy previously had had a problem when it physically fell 2
> feet, about 2 months ago < gulp > and I damaged the content of the file
> partitioning (I recovered all data, thou, with TestDisk) as a result of
> the cable being jerked out in the middle of a large data transfer. I did
> not observe any physical damage. That same hard drive was restored to
> functionality by removing all partitions and reformatting with gparted.
> This 800GB copy is my first use of it since. So its possible that
> external hard drive having a previous user induced failure is a factor
> in this.
/If/ that disk has damaged sectors, writing to them is retried several
times, a slow process. In MsDOS times you could see everything stopping
when this happened, and listen to the head motor doing “prrrrr”. I
suppose Linux is more resilient to this problem, but still it taxes the
system.
You should check the bad sector remap counter in the disk when it finishes.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)