pinkeen writes
"I've used Linux as my work & play OS for 5+ years. The one thing that constantly drives me mad is its IO scheduling. When I'm copying a large amount of data in the background, everything else slows down to a crawl while the CPU utilization stays at 1-2%. The process which does the actual copying is highly prioritized in terms of I/O. This is completely unacceptable for a desktop OS. I've heard about the efforts of Con Kolivas and his Brainfuck Scheduler, but it's unsupported now and probably incompatible with latest kernels. Is there any way to fix this? How do you deal with this? I have a feeling that if this issue was to be fixed, the whole desktop would become way more snappier, even if you're not doing any heavy IO in the background."
Update: 10/23 22:06 GMT by
T : As reader ehntoo points out in the discussion below, contrary to the submitter's impression, "Con Kolivas is still
actively working on BFS, it's not unsupported. He's even got a patch for 2.6.36, which was only released on the 20th.
He's also got a patchset out that I use on all my desktops which includes a bunch of tweaks for desktop use." Thanks to ehntoo, and hat tip to Bill Huey.