Diagnosing & fixing unacceptably slow I/O performance

[Vadi]

In a twist of my adventures, I apply the data=writeback,nobh option to fstab but not to menu.lst as well. Rebooted - and got a read-only / with a failure to load. Couldn't edit fstab either, because it was read-only as well. Not a good situation to be in when I wasn't quite sure what the eCryptfs passphase was.

Managed to remount it with "mount --no-mtab -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /" and edited the file back, though!

[Vadi]

I did away with the home folder encryption and performance noticeably improved to the point of being acceptable. Thanks allquixotic for the tip!

[allquixotic]

I did away with the home folder encryption and performance noticeably improved to the point of being acceptable. Thanks allquixotic for the tip!

Cool.

yeah, encrypted FS is just starting to be at acceptable perf levels with very new systems (>= 8GB RAM, Sandy/Ivy Bridge) thanks in part to the new crypto extensions (AES-NI) and SSDs. Most people who tried encrypted FS back several years ago on top of the line Core 2 systems with 2 to 4GB RAM (/me *raises hand*) got terrible performance.

[DeepDayze]

Cool.

yeah, encrypted FS is just starting to be at acceptable perf levels with very new systems (>= 8GB RAM, Sandy/Ivy Bridge) thanks in part to the new crypto extensions (AES-NI) and SSDs. Most people who tried encrypted FS back several years ago on top of the line Core 2 systems with 2 to 4GB RAM (/me *raises hand*) got terrible performance.

It was not just Linux that had performance issues with encrypted fs's...Windows has some perf issues with full disk encryption as well on such systems

[aceman]

I did away with the home folder encryption and performance noticeably improved to the point of being acceptable. Thanks allquixotic for the tip!

Then you can at least create a subdirectory in your /home that will be encrypted for the really important stuff Then basic programs like the file explorer or settings will not need to load from encrypted files.
However, then you must be sure the data does not leak out of this subdirectory, e.g. into /tmp or something like /home/.cache/thumbnails*.

[curaga]

yeah, encrypted FS is just starting to be at acceptable perf levels with very new systems (>= 8GB RAM, Sandy/Ivy Bridge) thanks in part to the new crypto extensions (AES-NI) and SSDs. Most people who tried encrypted FS back several years ago on top of the line Core 2 systems with 2 to 4GB RAM (/me *raises hand*) got terrible performance.

FYI, loop-aes had more than acceptable performance on Via Padlock systems with hardly any cpu usage already years ago.