I have a few dodgy cheap SSDs, so I’m not surprised by slow I/O performance in general. But my Plasma desktop frequently freezes for 1-3 seconds (including the cursor!) whenever there is high IO load, for example while installing a Steam game.

Updating the screen should be completely independent from I/O, shouldn’t it? Is there anything I could’ve misconfigured in my Arch Linux? I’m running Plasma 6.1.4 in Wayland.

  • FellOPEnglish
    1•1 month ago

    Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.

    I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don’t handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514

    I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.