From: Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>
To: Andreas Boman <aboman@midgaard.us>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] 2.5.72 O(1) interactivity bugfix
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 09:38:04 +1000
User-Agent: KMail/1.5.2
References: <200306190043.14291.kernel@kolivas.org> <200306190843.29170.kernel@kolivas.org> <1055977195.1077.41.camel@asgaard.midgaard.us>
In-Reply-To: <1055977195.1077.41.camel@asgaard.midgaard.us>
Cc: linux kernel mailing list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <200306190938.04430.kernel@kolivas.org>
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 3475
Lines: 68

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 08:59, Andreas Boman wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 18:43, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 03:59, Andreas Boman wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 10:43, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > > > --BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE--
> > > > Hash: SHA1
> > > >
> > > > Hi Ingo, all
> > > >
> > > > While messing with the interactivity code I found what appears to be
> > > > an uninitialised variable (p->sleep_avg), which is responsible for
> > > > all the boost/penalty in the scheduler. Initialising this variable to
> > > > 0 seems to have made absolutely massive improvements to system
> > > > responsiveness under load and completely removed audio skips up to
> > > > doing a make -j64 on my uniprocessor P4 (beyond which swap starts
> > > > being used), without changing the scheduler timeslices. This seems to
> > > > help all 2.4 O(1) based kernels as well. Attached is a patch against
> > > > 2.5.72 but I'm not sure about the best place to initialise it.
> > >
> > > Applying this ontop of 2.5.72-mm1 causes more xmms/mpg321/ogg123
> > > skipping than with plain -mm1 here. make -j20 on my up athlon 1900+
> > > with 512M ram causes extreme skipping until the make is killed. With
> > > plain -mm1 I may get _one_ skip at the very begining of a song during
> > > make -j20 (about 50% of the time). Plain -mm1 stops skipping after
> > > 10-15 sec of playback of a song, and even switching desktops after that
> > > doesnt cause skips, with or without make -j20 running (switching
> > > to/from desktops with apps like mozilla, evolution etc. will cause
> > > skips during the first 10-15 sec of a song regardless what I do it
> > > seems).
> > >
> > > Renicing xmms to -15 doesnt change anything with either kernel.
> >
> > Hmm. I got too excited with the fact it improved so much on the 2.4 O(1)
>
> Well, I got very exited when I saw your post ;) I guess this is a
> problem all us UP desktop users would like too see solved.
>
> > kernels that I didn't try it hard enough on the 2.5 kernels. I have had
> > people quietly telling me that it isn't uninitialised, but that I am
> > simply resetting it with this patch on new forked processes. It seems the
> > extra changes to the 2.5 scheduler make this patch make things worse?
>
> Yeah, I poked around a bit after I sent my earlier mail to see what may
> be going on and noticed that too. (In activate_task() and sched_exit()
> and some other place iirc)
>
> > I need more testing of the 2.4 one as well to see if it was just my
> > combination of hardware and kernel that was better with this...
>
> I suspect that is the case, yes, or I got unlucky with mine since it was
> extremely bad during the make -j. I'll see if I can get a 2.4.21-ck
> patched up with some other things I need here, and try to reproduce my
> results. That should tell us if it is infact scheduler differences or
> our different setups.

I had another look at 2.5 and noticed the max sleep avg is set to 10 seconds 
instead of 2 seconds in 2.4. This could make a _big_ difference to new forked 
tasks if they all start out penalised as most non-interactive. It can take 5 
times longer before they get the balance right. Can you try with this set to 
2 or even 1 second on 2.5?

Con

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/