Plasma freezes during high disk activity (solved) (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by fell@discuss.tchncs.de to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social

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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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[-] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

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.

this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024

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