Disk writes cause other applications to hang

I've set up an old laptop with Linux mint some months ago, and while the laptop's speed is fine when there are no disk write, even a very small write can cause other applications to hang until it is done, and i can also tell because i have an IO led so whenever it is on i know that i can't really interact with stuff whenever it's on.

SMART status doesn't seem to report anything, (tested some weeks ago, but issue was always present), but i'm willing to test again and show screenshots.

I'll show some maybe relevant information, note that my Linux fs is mounted on sda7.

some forums online suggested looking at /etc/fstab:

the following is an output of sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda7:

here is my system information:

If there is anything else that is relevant, I'd like to know, and thanks for any help.

9 comments

You have 8GB RAM and 1 hard drive. Given the symptoms you described, I'm wondering if your system is relying heavily on swap due to memory constraints? Your swap partition being on the same drive as your system and data files would mean that access to swap could be impacted by other disk I/O and lead to slowdowns or freezes.
2 solutions to this. Increase system RAM and/or Install a second hard drive and move swap partition to this new drive.
- I'm afraid it's a scheduler issue or something in mint. I have ssd, 7800x3d, 32gb ram and when downloading at 500MB/s the system works ridiculously slow
- Small problem with that line of thinking, though it is understandable, multitasking is smooth, unless there is a write IO operation, and the same is true for just running a single tab firefox or LyX (latex editor), so it's probably not ram usage.
  For this reason i disabled anything that might do writes in the background except for timeshift, and i saw massive improvements in responsiveness.
  Thanks for your input, still.
  I have a suspicion my machine might be waiting when it has write IO operations, because it doesn't heat up or make any noise, I've been looking for a way to make a fake io operation or something like that, to confirm this.

9 comments