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Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 13:07:04 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>
To: Tom Sightler <ttsig@tuxyturvy.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Strange load issues with 2.5.69/70 in both -mm and -bk trees.
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Tom Sightler <ttsig@tuxyturvy.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2003-06-01 at 00:45, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Tom Sightler <ttsig@tuxyturvy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I simply reniced this process to -10 and
> > >  everything started working fine.  Upon looking a little further it
> > >  seemed that the kernel was dynamically boosting the priority of the
> > >  process much higher than it probably should be, in the end, not leaving
> > >  enough CPU for playing the sounds without skipping.
> > 
> > Yes, it seems that too many real-world applications are accidentally
> > triggering this problem.
> > 
> > Could you please run an strace of the boosted process, find out what it is
> > doing to get itself boosted in this manner?  Wait until things are in
> > steady state and the process is boosted, then run `strace -tt <pid>' so we
> > see the timing info.
> 
> The strace was quite large so I have uploaded it to
> http://tuxyturvy.com/strace-pluginserver.gz
> 

Seems to be doing lots of small reads and writes.  Maybe to a pipe.  What
is the system context switch rate while this is happening?  From `vmstat
1'?

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