I have a few dodgy cheap SSDs, so I’m not surprised by slow I/O performance in general. But my Plasma desktop frequently freezes for 1-3 seconds (including the cursor!) whenever there is high IO load, for example while installing a Steam game.
Updating the screen should be completely independent from I/O, shouldn’t it? Is there anything I could’ve misconfigured in my Arch Linux? I’m running Plasma 6.1.4 in Wayland.
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I had something similar when my drive started to fail.
At first, it was annoying, because the cursor froze all the time, just like yours, then programs started to do the same, then they started to crash without reason, and in the end, even my unbreakable OS (Fedora Atomic) broke randomy and incoherently.
What did I learn? Don’t cheap out on drives, and keep enough backups.
Yeah, I’d be checking the smart stats on my drives and doing a full data backup if I didn’t already have one.
The SMART didn’t help. It showed full health and no errors.
While that’s encouraging, I would still make a full backup of my data and have a plan to replace the drive while I investigated further.
Chiming in to say that I’ve also experienced this on systems with an unresponsive NFS mount, although in that case it hangs until the connection is restored or the network operation times out.
Years ago I had a similar problem that was resolved by changing the method of I/O scheduling.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-change-the-linux-io-scheduler-to-fit-your-needs/
I’m not sure which one I used or if this is still relevant with modern Linux but it’s something to look into that might help.
Switch to zen kernel, use preempt=full kernel parameter.
It might be interesting to determine whether the freezes are limited to Plasma or are happening within the kernel.
- Have you tried Control+Alt+F1/F2/F3 … F8, to see if switching virtual consoles still works while the freezes are happening?
- Do you have another machine on the same network? You could use it to ssh into your desktop machine, and when the freezes are happening, see if they affect ssh interactivity.
Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.
I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don’t handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514
I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.
