From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263210AbTJONjS (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:39:18 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263220AbTJONjS (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:39:18 -0400 Received: from c210-49-248-224.thoms1.vic.optusnet.com.au ([210.49.248.224]:7052 "EHLO mail.kolivas.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263210AbTJONjR (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:39:17 -0400 From: Con Kolivas To: linux kernel mailing list Subject: RE: PROBLEM: Preemptible kernel makes mpg123 skip a lot under 2.6.0-testing7 and very high load average under low usage. Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:44:29 +1000 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.4 Cc: Dru MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200310152344.29920.kernel@kolivas.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi. I quote from your output: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 22953 andru 15 0 10100 5316 9464 S 3.7 0.6 2:02.39 mpg123 1067 root 5 -10 595m 58m 539m S 3.3 6.6 391:41.29 XFree86 1176 andru 15 0 47488 26m 13m S 1.0 3.0 11:52.32 gnome-terminal 25063 root 17 0 2004 1096 1792 R 0.7 0.1 0:00.03 top The kernel is now tuned to give much more priority to reniced tasks and it is not recommended to run your X server nice -10. This is the cause of your problem as X is starving your audio application. Some distributions do this by default to get around the limitations of the old cpu scheduler not being able to make X smooth enough at nice 0. This hack/workaround is no longer recommended for 2.6 kernels. You will find nice performance of X at nice 0 now and audio will not skip when the nice value of X is the same as your audio application. Con