Comment 199 for bug 131094

Milan: I did a fresh install of Jaunty on an empty SATA harddisk. The rest of the machine is the same and I kept my PATA harddisk in to copy the old files. That's when I noticed that while copying the interface was sluggish. Something I always cursed Windows for and was one of my true beliefs Linux was capable of doing - true multitasking and not starving something important (or something unimportant for that matter) as the interface, just because of copying some bytes to the disk (why did they invent DMA in the first place? ;)).

While copying some large files you can see that the MB/sec remains at about the same level when trying to open a console window, where in Intrepid the MB/sec surely drops and performance is divided between the copy-task and the open-task in favour of showing the drop down menu and starting the program you want to access.

Some hardware specs of the machine:
* AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
* 6 GB RAM (2x2GB + 2x1GB)
* Asus A8N-VM CSM motherboard running on nVidia GeForce 6150 nForce 430
* 1x PATA Samsung SP1614N
* 1x SATA Seagate ST3500841AS

I was copying from an XFS partition on the PATA disk to an XFS partition on the SATA disk.

I will now restart the machine using the Intrepid kernel and then I can try 'linux-image-2.6.29-02062901-generic_2.6.29-02062901_amd64.deb' from the kernel ppa mentioned above (thanks Tobi/Amit).

Is there some tool to measure the responsiveness or something? I would like to get some objective results instead of 'it feel sluggish'.