I have been trying all night to move about 500GB of data via a Samba share between a desktop and laptop but kept experiencing random timeouts in the connection (And having to resume the transfer). I finally gave up on getting that to work and went to an rsync process instead. As I'm sitting here watching things progress, I see that every 20-30 seconds or so, the rsync pauses for 5-10 seconds and then resumes as normal. If I go over to the laptop and attempt to do ANYTHING on it during this time, I get no responsiveness aside from the mouse cursor. I can move the mouse and click on apps, but nothing actually happens until the pause stops. When the rsync transfer starts working again, I suddenly have responsiveness on the laptop.
Obviously the same problem is occurring here that was happening with the NFS migration -- Just that rsync is able to continue working after the short timeout. My problem is that we are about to depend on this laptop for all of our media consumption for 5 weeks and I need to make sure it works well before we depart.
Any ideas on where to look? With the rsync running, the disk is experiencing 28-29MB/s writes. It is a 5400 rpm laptop drive, so this may be reaching its limit (I don't know what type of speed I should be expecting here) but would that cause these random freezings of the system?
Ram looks fine, CPU looks fine. Not swapping. I'm really at a loss here and not sure how to figure out where the problem might be.
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