Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756767AbZFPOmi (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:42:38 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755480AbZFPOmY (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:42:24 -0400 Received: from casper.infradead.org ([85.118.1.10]:41975 "EHLO casper.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755975AbZFPOmX (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:42:23 -0400 Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:43:04 -0700 From: Arjan van de Ven To: Robert Bradbury Cc: LKML Subject: Re: Scheduler fails to allow for "niceness" with new/fast processes Message-ID: <20090616074304.4e41ae98@infradead.org> In-Reply-To: References: Organization: Intel X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.0 (GTK+ 2.14.7; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by casper.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1627 Lines: 35 On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:23:59 -0400 Robert Bradbury wrote: > I primarily use my system (Gentoo) for 3 tasks: (a) Browsing the web > related to biomedical research (I may often have dozens of windows and > hundreds of tabs open in several browsers); (b) Running fairly CPU & > Disk I/O intensive genetics programs; (c) Performing low priority > rebuilds of various packages (Gentoo packages, firefox/chrome > releases, etc. > > Now (a) is my top priority -- I want my active browser to get all of > the CPU if it requires it (fast window/tab opens, quick page reloads & > redraws, etc.); (b) is of lesser priority and (c) is lowest priority. > This is on a 2.8 GHz Pentium IV (Prescott) with 3GB of RAM and 12GB > of swap on two drives. > > Now I normally run (c) processes at nice -n 19 to (in theory) get the > least CPU allocation. But it would appear that this does not work. I > often experience extremely poor user (esp. browser) performance when > running package builds. In monitoring the package builds I find that have you tried running latencytop in this workload to see why you're really stalling? Latencytop can at least tell you for sure if it's a scheduler issue or something else... -- Arjan van de Ven Intel Open Source Technology Centre For development, discussion and tips for power savings, visit http://www.lesswatts.org -- 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/