Normally I don't do much with USB disks on my machine, either flash drives or regular hard drives. When I do, it's mostly to do bulk read or write things such as blanking a disk or writing an installer image to a flash drive, and I've learned the hard way to force direct IO through dd when I'm doing this kind of thing. Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I was copying a directory of files to a USB flash drive, using USB 3.0 for once.

This simple operation absolutely murdered the responsiveness of my machine. Even things as simple as moving windows around could stutter (and fvwm doesn't exactly do elaborate things for that), never mind doing anything like navigating somewhere in a browser or scrolling the window of my Twitter client. It wasn't CPU load, because ssh sessions to remote machines were perfectly responsive; instead it seemed that anything that might vaguely come near doing filesystem IO was extensively delayed.

(As usual, ionice was ineffective. I'm not really surprised, since the last time I looked it didn't do anything for software RAID arrays.)

While hitting my local filesystems with a heavy IO load will slow other things down, it doesn't do it to this extent, and I wasn't doing anything particularly IO-heavy in the first place (especially since the USB flash drive was not going particularly fast). I also tried out copying a few (big) files by hand with dd so I could force oflag=direct, and that was significantly better, so I'm pretty confident that it was the USB IO specifically that was the problem.

I don't know what the Linux kernel is doing here to gum up its works so much, and I don't know if it's general or specific to my hardware, but it's been like this for years and I wish it would get better. Right now I'm not feeling very optimistic about the prospects of a USB 3.0 external drive helping solve things like my home backup headaches.

(I took a look with vmstat to see if I could spot something like a high amount of CPU time in interrupt handlers, but as far as I could see the kernel was just sitting around waiting for IO all the time.)

PS: We have more modern Linux machines with USB 3.0 ports at work, so I suppose I should do some tests with one just to see. If this Linux failure is specific to my hardware, it adds some more momentum for a hardware upgrade (cf).

(This elaborates on some tweets of mine.)