Hello there, I'm (happily) using mc for years, and performing copies/moves all day long with it. What I noticed on my laptop system, is that copying big files (say stuff like movie files, >250Mb), will often perform quite slowly and uncomfortably when it's done over USB2. I don't know if it's because of the USB2 xfer rate (to externals disks, or flash storage "keys"), but I feel that the system is performing poorly about it: I see the CPU being normally eaten by MC when it copies the file, then the system IOWait takes once or twice as long to complete, making the system quite difficult to use (it takes over user preemption, I hate this): in that case the best is to stop asking the system for mouse or keyboard interactions ;-). Although, I recently tried one thing: make the copy process a background one. I never used that feature before, and now know that I will always, at least for such massive copies. In fact, the process takes twice less CPU and the IOWait-thing is never hanging the system, it can be at least used at a user lever while the copy is performing, without glitches! Note that I don't care about the time a copy takes, but I ask it not to hang the system so that I can still use it. Could anyone tell me what's the difference between foreground and background copies? Are background copies being 'niced' down or low-system prioritized? If so, could that be an option for foreground copies, to make them more user-friendly? Regards, -- wwp
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