Speeding up the filesystem

Strife · 2003-06-16T18:44:11

I''ve been running Gentoo with ReiserFS for a couple months here now, and this is really beginning to bug me (though admittedly I did occasionally have this problem under Slackware with ext2/3 before). Basically what is happening is that when there is major disk usage going on (e.g., untarring a large tar.gz file or occasionally when compiling programs), my system will kinda burp along. In other words, it sorta hangs for a split second, runs normally, hangs for a split second, etc. So for example, if I''m running XMMS, whatever song I''m playing will be choppy when I''m doing something that slows it down. Is anyone aware of any ways to go about fixing this? I had initially heard it may be a problem with the kernel I was using, so I upgraded to the latest Gentoo kernel, and it did help a bit, but it still does it sometimes. Is there a specific kernel option or something that I should compile in?