Subject: Re: scheduler nice 19 versus 'idle' behavior / static low-priority
	scheduling
From: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
To: Nathanael Hoyle <nhoyle@hoyletech.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:24:07 +0100
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On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 00:49 -0500, Nathanael Hoyle wrote:

> Recently I installed the Folding@Home client, which many of you may be
> familiar with, intended to utilize spare CPU cycles to perform protein
> folding simulations in order to further medical research.  It is not a
> multi-threaded client at this point, so it simply runs four instances on
> my system, since it has four cores.  It is configured to run at
> nice-level 19.
> 
> Because it is heavily optimized, and needs little external data to
> perform its work, it spends almost all of its time cpu-bound, with
> little to no io-wait or blocking on network calls, etc.  I had been
> using it for about a week with no real difficulty until I went to watch
> another DVD and found that the video was slightly stuttery/jerky so long
> as foldingathome was running in the background.  Once I shut it down,
> the video playback resumed its normal smooth form.

Sounds like a problem was recently fixed.  Can you try 2.6.29-rc3 or
2.6.28.2?

	-Mike

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