[Autistic] pdflush

[Stephen Parkes]

Bit of a technical question.

I have a machine that is not only slow but also has little RAM this
means pdflush is running quite a lot and taking plenty of time doing
it's business.  The problem comes that the disk in this machine is
also really slow and when the kernel sees pdflush is having trouble it
launches another process.

The problem is when the two processes are competing for the disc they
both get i/o bound and bugger all good comes of it.  Even though ps
shows plenty of spare cpu time available no other processes can make
good use of it because the processor itself is waiting on i/o a lot of
the time.  When I hit the dirty page limit and flushing starts it's
like the machine is running through treacle not at all good and it
often takes several minutes to get back to it's normal self.

Is there any way to tell the kernel that one pdflush process is enough
and any more will have a negative effect?

sparkes

-- 
Steve 'sparkes' Parkes - tshirts http://nerd.ws - code http://zx-81.com
   Autistic LUG http://autisticlug.org - blog http://sp.arkes.co.uk