Re: removing an ext2fs file forces disk activity

[Niels Möller]

tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:

> nisse@lysator.liu.se (Niels Möller) writes:
> 
> > Perhaps idling, waiting for disk i/o requests to complete?
> 
> Do a big tar extraction on Linux and note that your tar process soaks
> up plenty of CPU time. 

The numbers depend a lot on the actual hardware, and the relative
speed of the cpu and disks, I think. I just tried extracting
gcc-3.0.4.tar (note, no .gz, unzipping would soak up most of the idle
time). top reported that the tar process consumed about 60% cpu, and
an overall CPU usage of about 10% user, 50% system and 40% idle.

This is on my good old Sparc station 4, a reasonably modern (low-end,
less than two years old) IBM scsi disk, and linux-2.2.19. I'd expect
more idle cycles on a modern machine and decent disk hardware, but I
don't have any around.

Regards,
/Niels