On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 08:53:08AM -0400, Jerry Geis
wrote:>
> Hello - frequently I turn on my external USB 3.0 disk and back. While my
> machine is copying and backing up my desktop becomes very sluggish.
>
> Is there a way to change that ? I am using CentOS 7.5 x86 with a very nice
> processor extra cores available and plenty of memory. There is no reason
> the "other" cores cannot keep the desktop going.
Are you performing the backup as your user during the same login
session? Or is it a separate process/separate login that's doing the
backup?
It's possible that the I/O elevator is balancing your backup session
with the I/O of the backup, making any disk activity by your login
session an equal priority (i.e. competing for resources).
You could always use ionice to make your backup process use idle
resources.
--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>