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by Dylan16807 4777 days ago
Sure does. Did you know that you can still entirely lock up windows simply by having a bunch of programs access the hard drive too much at once?

(And last time I made linux thrash it wasn't any better. Why is it so easy to keep the system responsive when a program or two hogs the CPU, but so hard when they hog disk I/O.)
1 comments
gizmo686 4777 days ago
I haven't actually looked into this question, but I suspect the problem isn't so much that the system isn't responsive when I/O is hogged, but rather that individual programs are not responsive. On my computer, I occasionally get into a congested hard drive issue, and almost all programs I am running are incredibly non-responsive. However, my window manager (awesome), and virtual terminals stay snappy during this period. This is in contrast to when my CPU starts getting thrashed, when even those begin to get unusable.
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Dylan16807 4777 days ago
In my experience the core UI systems usually lock up. I can't use even the simplest already-active non-memory-allocating programs. And can you explain caps lock not responding for 8 seconds without 'total system lockup'?
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