Disk I/O use 100%

[seriouslylost]

Hi,

I use Parity 1.6 on a PC with Windows 10 Home.
Turning on Parity (excellent software btw) causes Disk usage to reach 100% resulting in a slow computer.
I have doublechecked this several times.

[5chdn]

You can use the --db-path flag to prevent Parity from filling your primary disk by pointing the database to another location. Usually a fresh parity installation should not fill up more than 10GB. How much does your instance require?

[arkpar]

Also, after the initial sync it takes a few hours to download and import the blockchain in the background. During this process time high CPU/disk usage is to be expected.

[seriouslylost]

Never happens on my other computer using Windows 7. Helge

…

________________________________ From: Arkadiy Paronyan <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 11:12 AM To: paritytech/parity Cc: seriouslylost; Author Subject: Re: [paritytech/parity] Disk use 100% (#6020) Also, after the initial sync it takes a few hours to download and import the blockchain in the background. During this process time high CPU/disk usage is to be expected. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#6020 (comment)>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQGGGSf5c1fExL7zSeKM8d-X3Rg0wVOYks5sMgcUgaJpZM4ORuHc>.

[seriouslylost]

The problem is not the size, I have plenty hd space. The problem is that the computer is running slow. Helge

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________________________________ From: Afri <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 3:26 AM To: paritytech/parity Cc: seriouslylost; Author Subject: Re: [paritytech/parity] Disk use 100% (#6020) You can use the --db-path flag to prevent Parity from filling your primaty disk by pointing the database to another location. Usually a fresh parity installation should not fill up more than 10GB. How much does your instance require? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#6020 (comment)>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQGGGZEYzTyKncRsH3EbgqJIEPFQkZS7ks5sMZnhgaJpZM4ORuHc>.

[tomusdrw]

How much RAM do you have? Maybe it's just the SWAP file starting to be used?

[5chdn]

Now, understanding that we are talking not about disk usage but high disk I/O I can confirm this on all of my machines running parity. Systems often become unresponsive while parity syncs and it's not CPU or RAM (and not SWAP) but super high disk I/O (using iotop to monitor).

[seriouslylost]

@tomusdrw I have 8GB RAM. All the time when Parity is running disk usage is at 100%.

[eira-fransham]

The best way to fix this on Linux is to use ionice, but the equivalent for Windows is more complicated. There's this StackOverflow answer that has some answers, plus this project on GitHub includes a shim to emulate ionice. I don't think this is our responsibility, although it might be nice to document it.

EDIT: There should be an option in the task manager, under the name "process priority". You want to set it to "background".

[5chdn]

Didn't know about ionice(1) yet. Just tested with

ionice -c 3 -t parity

I could add some useful information to the FAQ.

[eira-fransham]

I just added it to the FAQ, along with instructions for Windows. I don't know if ionice works for macOS, but if anyone complains we can fix it then.

[5chdn]

Probably not much more we can do here. Regarding Windows: It's not clear whether process priority does affect I/O.

[eira-fransham]

The flavour text for low process priority mentions both CPU and IO on one of the versions of Windows that I saw a screenshot of, but I don't know if that's still true. Certainly at one time it affected IO priority.

[5chdn]

Can confirm ionice -c3 (lowest priority: "idle") does not solve this issue. just doing a full sync of ropsten and my browser and other apps keep freezing.

[5chdn]

I would like to close this as duplicate of #6280 - let's keep this in one place.