Re: Renice X for cpu schedulers

Gene Heskett
2007-04-19T18:16:19Z

On Thursday 19 April 2007, Con Kolivas wrote:

[and I snipped a good overview]

>So yes go ahead and think up great ideas for other ways of metering out cpu
>bandwidth for different purposes, but for X, given the absurd simplicity of
>renicing, why keep fighting it? Again I reiterate that most users of SD have
>not found the need to renice X anyway except if they stick to old habits of
>make -j4 on uniprocessor and the like, and I expect that those on CFS and
>Nicksched would also have similar experiences.

FWIW folks, I have never touched x's niceness, its running at the default -1
for all of my so-called 'tests', and I have another set to be rebooted to
right now. And yes, my kernel makeit script uses -j4 by default, and has
used -j8 just for effects, which weren't all that different from what I
expected in 'abusing' a UP system that way. The system DID remain usable,
not snappy, but usable.

Having tried re-nicing X a while back, and having the rest of the system
suffer in quite obvious ways for even 1 + or - from its default felt pretty
bad from this users perspective.

It is my considered opinion (yeah I know, I'm just a leaf in the hurricane of
this list) that if X has to be re-niced from the 1 point advantage its had
for ages, then something is basicly wrong with the overall scheduling, cpu or
i/o, or both in combination. FWIW I'm using cfq for i/o.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.