[haiku-3rdparty-dev] Re: Problem with High Disk-IO Freezing GUI
- From: Pete Goodeve <pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-3rdparty-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:49:17 -0800
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:29:11AM +1300, Andrew Lindesay wrote:
>
> I have been working on a small Haiku application for a while. A first
> thing the user does with the application is to install some data. The
> data needs to be processed and this processing takes a while and is a
> bit disk-IO intensive. For this reason, I put up a progress bar so the
> user can see something is happening. Unfortunately, the heavy disk-IO
> seems to render the 'GUI' unresponsive; even the mouse-pointer freezes.
>
> (meanwhile; another person has checked and the problem doesn't seem to
> be happening on real hardware; just on virtual hardware - VirtualBox.)
>
> To demonstrate the problem, I have built a small Haiku application with
> just this problem distilled out. You can get this from;
>
> http://www.silvereye.co.nz/tmp/maketrouble-1.0.0.tgz
>
> I'd like to know if there's anything that can be done in Haiku to better
> handle this in a future release or is there anything that I should be
> doing differently in my application to better handle this?
>
I did a quick check with the above source, and yes, it happens
-- *if* you have only a single processor. On my 4-processor machine
I normally don't see it, but if I turn off 3 of them I get a display freeze
while the disk is being accessed.
I suspect this is the same 'priority inversion' problem that has been
bugging a number of us! It really shouldn't happen, but there may not
be much you can do about it until the glitch is fixed. (It is being worked
on -- still, I hope!) Maybe just a very short pause between I/O would
help without slowing things too much
-- Pete --
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