Re: 2.6 vs 2.4 regression when running gnomemeeting

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 09:11:50PM +0100, Christian Meder wrote:
> I've got a longstanding regression in gnomemeeting usage when switching
> between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
> Phenomenon: 
> Without load gnomemeeting VOIP connections are fine. As soon as some
> load like a kernel compile is put on the laptop the gnomemeeting audio
> stream is cut to pieces and gets unintelligible . On 2.4.2x I don't get
> even the slightest distortion in the audio stream under load. I played
> around with different nice levels with no success. The problem persisted
> during the whole 2.6.0-test series no matter whether I used -mm kernels
> or pristine Linus kernels. Even when nicing the kernel compile to +19
> the distortions start right away. I tried Nick Piggin's scheduler which
> fared slightly better after changing the nice level of gnomemeeting to
> -10 but it's still a far cry from the 2.4.2x feeling without any
> fiddling with nice values.
> Any hints where to start looking are greatly appreciated.

Please instrument your workload with the following, and send logs of the
output (preferably compressed) to me and possibly others:

top b d 5
vmstat 5
while true; do cat /proc/vmstat; sleep 5; done
while true; do cat /proc/meminfo; sleep 5; done

A good way to log commands like this is:

(command) > /home/foo.log.1 2>&1 &

where parentheses surround the command in the actual shell input.


-- wli