Re: Busy-wait delay in qmail 1.03 after upgrading to Linux 2.6

[Haakon Riiser <hakonrk@ulrik.uio.no>]

> Output from time:
> 
>   real    0m0.309s
>   user    0m0.011s
>   sys     0m0.004s

Just wanted to comment on my own data, since I just noticed it myself:

The output from time indicates that the system is _not_ using CPU
while delaying, so you might wonder why I said it did.  The reason
is that I'm using an AfterStep applet (ascpu) to monitor CPU usage,
and it appeared to work fine in 2.6.  Now, I see that there are
differences:  For example, another problem I encountered while
upgrading to 2.6 was that disk intensive jobs, such as updating
the slocate database, made ascpu report 100% CPU usage.  I just
ran top (procps 2.0.16) beside it, and it reported approximately
10% CPU usage, which is no more than 2.4 used.

I don't know how ascpu measures CPU usage, but it's interesting
that it appears to work fine for the most part, while giving
_completely_ different results from all other programs (e.g.,
time, top, ps) in the write-delay case, and other disk related
activities.

(For the record, I've never seen ascpu's results differ from
top's under Linux 2.4.x.)

-- 
 Haakon