Wasn't sure where to post this. I have a pretty powerful computer! I believe specs are in my sig but just to rehash:
Core i7 2600K
8(2x4) GB of Corsair Dominator RAM
180 GB Intel 330 Series SATA 3 SSD Boot Drive(with roughly 2 80 GB partitions, one for Win 8 and one for Kubuntu - NO SWAP PARTITION!).
1x1TB WD Green
1x2TB WD Green
2x3TB WD Green HDDs
MSI 4890 GPU


Now generally, it runs fine in windows or linux, but when I get in linux(have not tested Windows yet) and do anything involving major HDD I/O activity, such as extracting a bunch of split rar archives, or just a few minuets ago I was running a Windows 7 VM, the system becomes crippled and starts lagging or just a moment ago, froze up completely. Now you might think, "yeah...you system is going to freeze up or lag when enough resources are used" but I don't feel that is the case. When I froze up a few min ago, I was running CuteFTP in a Win 7 VM to download a bunch of data from my server. I was using less then 50% of my CPU power, and I was using between 5-6GB of RAM. The downloads were going to 1 of the 3TB Green HDDs above, so it's not like my boot drive should be seeing to much activity. Even then, the HDD was onyl being written to at less then 15Megabits per second which should be well below what the drive can handle even if it is a "green drive." Plus the Green HDD and boot drive are running on my only SATA 3 ports on the mobo.

Looking at the specs, it is obviously a high end machine. So I don;t understand the lag for simply using a Windows VM.

This is a kernel issue from what I understand. You may want to try different I/O schedulers for your disks, and I would recommend ensuring that swap is off as the linux kernel sometimes swaps unnecessarily.

bcooksley wrote:This is a kernel issue from what I understand. You may want to try different I/O schedulers for your disks, and I would recommend ensuring that swap is off as the linux kernel sometimes swaps unnecessarily.

Could you please point me to some detailed info on how to do these things? Thanks!

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1009 ... -scheduler for more information on I/O schedulers.

a bit confused - is this is a VM guest only issue? if so:

which host VM?
how much ram allocated to guest?
is both acceleration options enabled?
are VM extensions installed?

something like https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=39943

google01103 wrote:a bit confused - is this is a VM guest only issue? if so:

1. which host VM?
2. how much ram allocated to guest?
3. is both acceleration options enabled?
4. are VM extensions installed?

something like https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=39943

No the issue is host/parent side,

1. Kubuntu 12.10 x64 with VMware Workstation 9.X(9.1 I think)
2. Off hand, about 3GB. Maybe 4.
3. No idea.
4. No idea.

If it's a Linux thing you can see if using ksysguard to lower the priority of the app causing the delay helps

google01103 wrote:If it's a Linux thing you can see if using ksysguard to lower the priority of the app causing the delay helps

I have not tried this but I did play with the schedulers with no luck. In the case of Vmware Server, it seems to happen most commonly if I leave the VM open for a few days. Plus, maybe I missed something, but wouldn't i have to set the priority every time I start the happen? This does not seem like an ideal solution. Even if the setting sticks, this does not feel like a proper solution like schedulers would have if that worked.

Scheduler wise my SSD was already running with the noop I/O scheduler. Based on my research, I don't think I saw any disputing noop is best suited for flash based media like an SSD, and in the case of vmware, all the activity is taking place on my SATA3 SSD which is running on a SATA3 port with a SATA3 cable(just saying since SATA connections are backwards compatible). There is no swap partition on the SSD, but I have not maxed out my RAM usage yet, so running from ram rather then swap is better performance wise correct?

Well I read about changing the cstate settings for Intel CPUs. I am not sure if the guide was too old or what, but it didn't work. I booted in to a BIOS and decided to disable cstate. Since then I have been running with cstate turned off. While not ideal, I am able to throw any work load at my computer and it handles it with absolutely no lag so far. With vmware open and running win 8, I am also encoding a video and able to multi task with out issue. Any suggestions on how to maximize performance while maintain the CPU scaling of cstate?

Rather interesting that CPU scaling affects this.

Have you tried changing the CPU governor? Usually 'ondemand' is used for real time scaling - which is the default.

Well I spoke to soon. Changing cstate does help on the Linux side. The problems with VMware persist. I notice the lag only kicks in after about 24 hours of running the VM. It makes me wonder if it is something building up over time like nepomunk indexing? On the windows VM side I disabled super fetch and lagging file. the VM is running on a Intel x25M G2 with nothing else on the drive. I had been running it of my 320 or 3TB green previously. I have to double check what scheduler the x25 is using.

The x25 is an 80gb drive and runs the ext4 filesystem. VM runs as a single file and space was preallocated to about 70gb for the VM.

sorry, double post.

I would suggest checking to see if any other application is hitting any disk particularly hard, as the Linux I/O schedulers are not known for being particularly great at handling busy conditions.

The thing is, it's not always busy. Last night I had konversation, Firefox, Thunderbird , and maybe some other apps but nothing intensive. In the VM I simply had windows. I will test the schedulers in a bit and see if it helps but like I said it takes time for the problem to build up and gradually bring the whole rig to a crawl out freeze.

Going to test the schedulers in a moment. I turned cstate back on and now the rig is really bad! Even something like extractin 2 split archives at the same time, about 1GB(give or take), causes lag or momentary freezing. I checked dmesg and the only thing out of the ordinary was this:
[34950.696588] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3000913135:3000913393 (repaired)
[34951.458402] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3000917743:3000918001 (repaired)
[34970.144962] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3000950537:3000950795 (repaired)
[35121.524095] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001135512:3001135862 (repaired)
[35171.784377] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001203484:3001203931 (repaired)
[35210.270318] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001290266:3001290524 (repaired)
[35242.893030] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001372251:3001372509 (repaired)
[35252.908410] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001416903:3001417092 (repaired)
[35275.906647] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001475241:3001475499 (repaired)
[35324.495686] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001627422:3001627680 (repaired)
[35348.818152] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3001700191:3001700541 (repaired)
[35724.097013] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002239984:3002240242 (repaired)
[35911.417370] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002510910:3002511168 (repaired)
[35971.178490] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002620458:3002620716 (repaired)
[36035.303113] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002733202:3002733460 (repaired)
[36114.724001] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002957706:3002957964 (repaired)
[36120.232255] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3002980300:3002980558 (repaired)
[36134.184376] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3003040210:3003040395 (repaired)
[36141.020822] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3003053961:3003054219 (repaired)
[36141.579228] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:ae21:68ba:2478/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 3003053961:3003054219 (repaired)
[37797.476142] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:48aa:3341:2641/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 1585212458:1585212716 (repaired)
[37906.723733] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:48aa:3341:2641/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 1585785051:1585785309 (repaired)
[40932.459575] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:48aa:3341:2641/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 1594861488:1594861814 (repaired)
[42904.057725] Peer 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:48aa:3341:2641/60545 unexpectedly shrunk window 1605351705:1605351963 (repaired)