Kubuntu 14.04 freezing when I copy file to usb storage

[Behrooz]

all ntfs or fat32 usb storage have problem.

[Teunis]

A weird problem.

Because I regularly copy >4GB files to ntfs drives without problems.

I do know Linux can run into problems with especially ntfs if the file system is not spotlessly clean, to get it fixed you need to plug the drive into a Win7 computer and allow for an automatic check & repair.

If this does not happen automatically, right click the drive (in Win7), go for properties and find and run the check and repair option.

[Behrooz]

From your conversations did you find a solution or what is happening with this problem? Is it a bug I guess?

if external usb has ext4 filesystem there is not problem but if external usb has fat32 or ntfs problem still here . in first case i test 4 times and i don't see freezing and lag . i said on kubuntu channel this problem only is on my laptop . my PC haven't any freezing or lag during copy file . becuse all user around me use windows and usb storege ( fat32 or NTFS ) i can't use usb storege with ext4 filesystem becuse windows can't work with filesystem .

[anika200]

Thanks
I raised on kubuntu channel on irc and pepole there say " The 'problem' you have is that the CPU is waiting for IO. In the meantime it does nothing else. It's just waiting."
all my coversion on irc is this link . my username is aoa
http://paste.ubuntu.com/8299483/

From your conversations did you find a solution or what is happening with this problem? Is it a bug I guess?

[Behrooz]

Thanks
I raised on kubuntu channel on irc and pepole there say " The 'problem' you have is that the CPU is waiting for IO. In the meantime it does nothing else. It's just waiting."
all my coversion on irc is this link . my username is aoa
http://paste.ubuntu.com/8299483/

[jlittle]

EDCA-D596 is name of USB storage

I meant what type, brand and model of device is it. F.ex I have an Apacer 4GB USB stick, and a Hitachi Touro 1 TB USB portable hard drive. Is it using USB 3?
I suspect that Kubuntu is encountering severe trouble with that device. With the brand and model we can google for problems. I wonder also if the USB on your laptop has the problem; if so, it's driver in Kubuntu might be the cause of the trouble.

What is normal value of load average?

Just copying a large file, while watching it, I wouldn't expect more than 4, and some of that would be kwin and Xorg. The "load" is the number of things ("schedulable entities") on the run queue, ready to run right now, including waiting for IO.
Your laptop has 4 cores so in theory you're not running out of CPU and the ps display did not show any processes using much CPU (except for kazam, which was using a lot, but only about 1 or 2 CPUs). You might try running top, then press H (shows threads), F and select the Process Status field using the arrow keys, press s, Esc, R. That'll put the IO bound (D) and runnable (R) threads at the top, and I wonder what they are; there should be 9 if the load average is 9.

A few thoughts.

• Does df -h show any systems nearly full?
• How clean is the file system on the USB storage? Supposedly only windows knows how to check that, or fix it up; I'm sorry I don't know how to use windows to do that.
• I've seen a report of someone solving a similar problem by updating the firmware on the laptop. He (er, his name was Mark) had to use windows to do it.
• What does dmesg in a console show when you plug in the USB storage, and when you open it in dolphin, and when you do the copy?

I just found a long thread on bugzilla from 2012 and the problems they're discussing from about post #571 resemble yours closely. It started in 2009! https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309 "Large I/O operations result in poor interactive performance and high iowait times". The BFS scheduler see wikipedia article is reported to fix the problem, but it has not reached Ubuntu. The wikipedia page says Manjaro Linux has BFS; if you've got Fedora, Suse as well as kubuntu you might try one more.

If I ask here about BFS, I'm not sure if anyone will notice, so I'm going to start a new thread about BFS.

[Behrooz]

Dose anynoe have ideasa for my problems ?

Idea

[Behrooz]

Hi
For kazam : yes when I don't use kazam problem is still available
EDCA-D596 is name of USB storage 16 GB, dolphin set this name to usb storage.
My file system home partition is ext4 and system file usb storage always is ntfs or fat32
I say point, I have Pc at home, I haven't any issue of copy file on it, this problem only available on my laptop.
What is normal value of load average?

[jlittle]

I watched the video.

• My intuition about swapping was wrong.
• I think the load average at 8 or 9 is really bad. I couldn't see anything causing this.
• kazam is having a large impact, but I assume you're having trouble when you're not doing screen casts.
• What is EDCA-D596? Details, please. What file system is on it? Do you have trouble without this plugged in?

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

[Behrooz]

I record video from my desktop, please watch it.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/n5...8/freezing.mkv

[jlittle]

I'd have thought that for a disc-intensive operation to impact system responsiveness (mouse lagging...) your system would have to be swapping, so something running using all or most of that 4 GiB. Baloo (KDE's new file indexer) was reported to cause slowness for some in early releases of Kubuntu Trusty, but you report several distros with the same trouble, IIUC Fedora 20 and Ubuntu don't run KDE. kinfocenter -> memory will show the situation at a glance.

[Behrooz]

OK I will test

[vinnywright]

strange ,,,,,,I copy large (700MB-1.5GB) files from HD to USB quite often and cant remember ever having a lock up ,,,,,,,,but then again I'm probably not doing much more than web browsing wile doing the copy/transfer .

the next time you go to do a copy/transfer first open a konsole and run "top" look to see if something starts eating up CPU and or RAM and swap.

VINNY

[Behrooz]

Is that bug of kernel?

[Behrooz]

Laptop Lenovo G-500 with cpu Corei3, Ram 4 GB, Hdd 500 GB