Something beautiful has happened in 2.4.17-pre2.
Interactive Latency during very heavy disk I/O has dropped dramatically.
Several LTP tests have a tendency to make interactive performance poor.
The improvement in 2.4.17-pre2 is astonishing.
Normally runalltests.sh does one test at a time. Since the usual
interactivity slowdown during the growfiles tests didn't happen, I
tried running a bunch of things at once.
Concurrently:
3 growfiles scripts (run all growfiles tests in LTP).
3 LTP runalltests.sh
setiathome
make clean dep bzImage modules
list directories with lots files that hadn't been listed before in this boot.
ps, w, logout, login.
3 irc clients, play a couple mp3s, read entertaining Coding Standards thread.
The start time of the concurrent growfiles and runalltests.sh was spaced
out, so different tests were being executed.
Occasionally ls or w had a 10 second or so delay, but delays were infrequent,
and shorter than usual.
Kudos to all the Kernel Hackers!
--
Randy Hron