ionice!!!

Hot damn! ionice is incredible.

I was going to say "nice", but that would have been obvious and shallow.

I know, that's a link to a short tutorial on how to use ionice, I like short tutorial links though, so I can test something out quickly.

I'm installing something very IO heavy in vmware. This is on a single-core 1.5Ghz, 1.25GB Ram laptop (slow IDE hard drive). Before ionice, the browser and sometimes all of X would stall on me for some seconds (30-40) before getting more responsive. I don't mind if the vmware process takes a long time to run. If it finishes tomorrow, well, I'll just sleep through it. So it's very nice to be able to lower its IO priority so that it doesn't make the laptop completely unusable when it's shoveling gigabytes around on the disk.

Highly recommended. Requires at least kernel 2.6.13 though. I've already asked the system administrators at work for one of the debian servers at work to be upgraded to 2.6.13 or higher. That box runs a very long running doxygen process that makes everything else crawl for a while. It'll be great to get some of that performance back :-).