Whenever there is high disk I/O, the system tends to be much slower and less responsive than usual. What's the progress on Linux kernel regarding this? Is this problem actively being worked on?
Linux Performance – Improving System Performance During High Disk I/O
iokernellinuxperformance
Best Answer
I think for the most part it has been solved. My performance under heavy IO has improved in 2.6.36 and I expect it to improve more in 2.6.37. See these phoronix Articles.
Here's a direct link to the bug
Also from Phoronix
There's also the Phoronix 2.6.36 release announcement
It seems block barriers are going away and that should also help performance.
There's also this LWN article on fair I/O Scheduling
I would say IO reawakened as a big deal about the time of the release of ext4 in 2.6.28. The following links are to Linux Kernel Newbies Kernel releases, you should review the Block, and Filesystems sections. This may of course be unfair sentiment, or just the time I started watching FS development, I'm sure it's been improving all along, but I feel that some of the ext4 issues, 'caused people to look hard at the IO stack, or it might be that they were expecting ext4 to resolve all the performance issues, and then when it didn't they realized they had to look elsewhere for the problems.
2.6.28, 2.6.29, 2.6.30, 2.6.31, 2.6.32, 2.6.33, 2.6.34, 2.6.35, 2.6.36, 2.6.37