From: Roger Larsson <roger.larsson@skelleftea.mail.telia.com>
To: Felipe Alfaro Solana <felipe_alfaro@linuxmail.org>,
       Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@fprintf.net>
Subject: Memory? Re: O(1) scheduler & interactivity improvements
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 21:21:01 +0200
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On m?ndagen den 23 juni 2003 20.59, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 18:21, Daniel Gryniewicz wrote:
> > > So then, why I can easily starve the X11 server (which should be marked
> > > interactive), Evolution or OpenOffice simply by running "while true; do
> > > a=2; done". Why don't they get an increased priority boost to stop the
> > > from behaving so jerky?
> >
> > You're own metric will kill you here.  You're while true; loop is
> > running in the shell, which is interactive (it has accepted user in put
> > in the past) and can therefore easily starve anything else.  You need a
> > an easy way to make an interactive process non-interactive, and that's
> > what these threads are all about, making interactive threads
> > non-interactive (and the other way around) in a fashion that maximises
> > the user experience.  A history of user input is not necessarily a good
> > metric, as many non-interactive CPU hogs start out life as interactive
> > threads (like your loop above).
>
> OK, replace "while true; ..." with a parallel kernel compile, for
> example, and the effect, on a 700Mhz laptop, is nearly the same: you can
> easily starve XMMS, and X11 feels jerky. Changing between virtual
> desktops in KDE produces the same effect, also.

And you are shure that you do not fill up your RAM?
(700MHz laptop does not sound like lots of RAM...)

* Parallel kernel compile, unlimited?
* Changing virtual desktops might be memory limited too...

Check with 'vmstat'

/RogerL

-- 
Roger Larsson
Skellefte?
Sweden
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