How to lower I/O priority for file copying operations under Linux Mint?

Question

Whenever I copy files from a disk to another on my personal Linux system, the OS stops responding appropriately, the UI starts behaving erratically, any movies I'm playing will freeze and continue until the file transfer is done. I don't care if the transfer takes longer.

Is there any way of lowering the I/O priority of these operations? The main problem is when copying files using Dolphin.

I'm using Linux Mint KDE 16.

Answer 1

I am not sure how to apply that setting to all copy operations but, as a single time solution, you can use the ionice command. It will look something like that:

ionice -c 3 cp src dst

The -c is a class, which can be one of three possible:

• Idle (class 3) - A program running with idle io priority will only get disk time when no other program has asked for disk io for a defined grace period.
• Best effort (class 2) - This is the effective scheduling class for any process that has not asked for a specific io priority.
• Real Time (class 1) - The RT scheduling class is given first access to the disk, regardless of what else is going on in the system

For more details look here.