[ale] Really slow copy

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

On Monday 16 February 2009 12:33 pm, James Taylor wrote:
> You didn't mention what method you are using to copy.
> If I have a small amount of data to copy, I use fish:// protocol in
> konqueror (essentially graphical scp), which is very slow. I have found it
> exhibits similar behavior to what you describe.

The server has Kubuntu 8.10 installed and I initiated the copy using the 
Dolphin file manager. Don't know what protocol it uses other than file:///. 
As I said, it's copying over an NFS mount and the server is pulling files 
from the laptop.

I don't understand where the bottleneck is. Why is it getting so little CPU 
time? Why has its share dropped so much and never resumed? I don't think 
there's a lot of local network noise but I don't know how to measure that. I 
seem to get good responsiveness from the laptop.

Would I be better off killing the current process and starting over with just 
plain old cp? I've already invested about 18 hours in this thing and don't 
have much to show.

Open to suggestions.

Thanks.


>
> If I have a lot to copy in a local environment, I usually use smb.
>
> -jt
>
>
> James Taylor
> The East Cobb Group, Inc.
> 678-697-9420
> james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com
> http://www.eastcobbgroup.com
>
> >>> Tim Watts <timtw at earthlink.net> 2/16/2009 12:26 PM >>>
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm backing up my laptop home dir to my new file server in prep to cut-over
> to Kubuntu. It's about 17GB of data. I started it about 7.30p last night
> and it was steadily pulling files (server <- laptop via NFS mount) taking
> about 60+% of the CPU... UNTIL I left for a few hours and came back. It's
> now only copied about 2.5GB and getting only 10+/-% of CPU. I tried
> renicing the process which has had only a marginal improvement. Nothing
> else seems to be competing for CPU or disk IO. The system has 1GB RAM and
> the copy process is taking about 70% of memory. The network medium is CAT 6
> via a LinkSys WRT54G. I was streaming some audio from the Internet for a
> while but shut that down and it's made no difference. The laptop has 1GB
> RAM and a number of apps loaded but the CPU is fairly idle.
>
> 17GB is a lot of data. Maybe I'm not fully appreciating that -- i.e. maybe
> it just takes this long to copy all that data? Although the rate is about
> 2.6MB/min (ball park figure).
>
> Any ideas how I can get this puppy moving again?
>
> Thanks.

-- 
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to 
win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
 -- Agatha Christie