Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Thumb loading

I talked about thumb drives a while back. And, i'm at it again, downloading huge amounts of stuff and tossing it onto thumb drives.

Not only does it take awhile to fill a 2 GB kingston, but it also sends the load average through the roof. It's typical to take an otherwise unloaded system from a load of zero to a load of 5. And, it stays there for the duration. What's with that? The CPU is 99.7% idle. So, it's not like parallel ports where the CPU needs to do something every few bytes transfered. What are the other 4 tasks waiting to run? And despite the low CPU load, responsiveness during copies to the USB thumb devices is sluggish and jumpy.

This is under Linux.

Anyone have any idea why? Is it different under Windows? Mac? OS/X?

1 comment:

freethoughtguy said...

My thumb drive works fine on my Windoze PC. My biggest worry is that I'll lose the tiny thing!