I want to fill the free space on my hard drive with a command like that :
# dd if=/dev/zero of=z
but it causes GNOME to freeze regularly for a few seconds. Even the mouse cursor is affected.
How can I prevent dd from freezing the interface when writing huge amounts of data ?
Best Answer
Try using
ionice
:This start the
dd
process with the "idle" IO priority: it only gets disk time when no other process is using disk IO for a certain amount of time.Of course this can still flood the buffer cache and cause freezes while the system flushes out the cache to disk. There are tunables under
/proc/sys/vm/
to influence this, particularly the dirty_* entries.It also depends on the disk scheduling algorithm, CFQ is best for this.