# Copying data makes my computer slow and dolphin freeze

## TimeManx

I've 2 GB of RAM  on my computer and after going through a number of threads in the forum, I've configured gentoo-sources 3.1.6 x86_64 with

Autogroup

CFQ

zram (128 MB as swap)

zcache

Transparent Huge Pages (madvise)

Memory Compaction

Preemptile kernel

The system is quite responsive after boot but launching programs like eclipse, thunderbird simultaneosly deteriorates the performance significantly.

Also, copying large amounts of data from one drive to another is sporadic and the drives become inaccesible during that time which causes dolphin to freeze.

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## NeddySeagoon

TimeManx,

Lets see now - you have swap in a compressed filesystem in RAM. The idea of swap is to move stack space which is used but not needed out of RAM so it can be used for other things.

Swap zram takes CPU time to do the compress/decompress and having swap in RAM may well be the reason for needing to swap in the first place.

The other things are mostly harmless.

Copying causes your RAM to fill with 'dirty' buffers.  This is a particular issue when copying from a fst to a slow device, like an internel HDD to a USB drive.

You can tune when flushing to the output device starts but I don't think you can limit how much RAM is used for disk buffers.

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## TimeManx

Thanks for replying. I have disabled zram.

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Copying causes your RAM to fill with 'dirty' buffers.  This is a particular issue when copying from a fst to a slow device, like an internel HDD to a USB drive.
> 
> You can tune when flushing to the output device starts but I don't think you can limit how much RAM is used for disk buffers.

 

The issue is not only from a fast to a slow device. Even copying on a different drive on the same HDD  leads to "locking up" of the respective drives for 5-6 minutes. Could this be related to one of the drives being ntfs?

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