---
 layout: post
 title: "Fix system freezing while copying to a flash drive"
 date: 2014-04-26 21:11
 comments: true
 categories: [linux]
 cover: /images/cover/avatar.png
 keywords: linux, kernel, freezing, usb, flash drive, fix, slow, unresponsive
 description: Slow linux desktop while copying to a flash drive
 ---
 
 I copied about 10 GiB data from my hard drive to a USB3.0 flash drive.
 Much to my surprise the system started freezing, songs playback became
 interrupted, etc. Eventually I had to wait until the copying process finished.
 
 Well, something like that is simply unacceptable if you have 8-core i7 processor,
 8 GiB RAM and SSD. 
 
 So I've found a simple solution. The problem was wrong setting of dirty pages
 (because of [historical reasons](https://lwn.net/Articles/572928/)).
 It's a [well-known](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1584789/focus=1587022)
 Linux kernel problem.
 
 What I did was:
 
 {% codeblock lang:bash %}
 echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
 echo 33554432 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes
 echo 66554432 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes
 {% endcodeblock %}
 
 After applying these changes CPU load dropped from 6 to 3 and system was fast 
 and responsive. To make that changes persistent add the lines below to ```/etc/tmpfiles.d/dirty.conf```:
 
 {% codeblock %}
 w /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio - - - - 0
 w /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes - - - - 33554432
 w /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes - - - - 66554432
 {% endcodeblock %}
 
 Maybe it's already fixed in current kernel, I don't know. I'm running OpenSUSE 13.1
 with 3.11.10-7-desktop kernel.