Limit disk I/O one program creates?

Posted by Posipiet on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Posipiet
Published on 2010-04-27T11:59:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 12:04 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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lvm

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kvm

Hardware: one virtualization server. Dual Nehalem, 24GB RAM, 2 TB mirrored HD.

Software: Debian, KVM, virt-manager on the server with several virtual machines that use Linux too. 2 TB Disk is a big LVM, each VM gets a logical volume and makes its own partitions in that.

Problem: One of the programs that runs on one of the VMs creates huge disk load. This never was an issue, because the program never ran on such a powerful hardware. Now the CPUs are fast, and lots of I/O is the result. We cant do much against that at the moment, because the tool is a black box. On the other hand, the speedy computation is welcome. The program creates about 5 GB of temp files which get overwritten during the next iteration.

Question: How can we limit the disk I/O for the process?

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