Improve modem connection under heavy disk activity 3704

Netocrat

Do you have a real modem, or a brain-damaged WinModem? Because I have a real modem and have never had a problem like that. Even when my system is running the CPUs 100% loaded, which is almost all the time; like right now:

11:05:19 up 4 days, 11:04, 4 users, load average: 4.07, 4.14, 4.17 149 processes: 144 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 1.5% 97.5% 0.8% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu00 2.5% 96.5% 0.6% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.1% cpu01 0.8% 98.6% 0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu02 1.8% 96.9% 1.1% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu03 1.0% 98.1% 0.8% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

At the moment, the disk drives are very lightly loaded, but I have seen sustained transfer rates of about 60 Megabytes-second through them at the same time as I am downloading pin-ups from the UseNet, and no noticeable interaction.

My transfer rate varies depending on the noise on the line, and how busy the servers are. I sometimes get 13,000 bytes-second, but I buttume that is with data where the hardware compression is particularly effective. I often see 7,500 bytes-second.

Inferior brand of modem? or inferior brand of hard drives? or inferior brand of IDE controller?

None of those should matter, once the connection is established. And if there is a problem with them, you normally could not even dial or connect.

If you have a brain-damaged modem, replace it.

You might wish to see if your IDE controller is configured to do DMA I-O, so as to reduce the interrupt and process-switching load on your machine, but with a processor as fast as yours, I doubt that is sufficient to cause the troubles you are seeing (worth checking, though). If you have SCSI hard drives, this is most unlikely to be the problem.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 11:00:00 up 4 days, 10:58, 4 users, load average: 4.12, 4.18, 4.20