Re: 2.5.65-mm2

Steven P. Cole
2003-03-19T20:49:56Z

On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 13:10, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Steven Cole <elenstev@mesatop.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 02:21, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >
> > > http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/2.5/2.5.65/2.5.65-mm2/
> > >
> >
> > I am seeing a significant degradation of interactivity under load with
> > recent -mm kernels. The load is dbench on a reiserfs file system with
> > increasing numbers of clients. The test machine is single PIII, IDE,
> > 256MB memory, all kernels PREEMPT.
>
> (This email brought to you while running dbench 128 on ext3)
>
> There's a pretty big reiserfs patch in -mm. Are you able to whip up
> an ext2 partition and see if that displays the same problem?
>

I repeated the test on an ext3 partition, and the response with 28
dbench clients running is definitely better, although I'm starting to
get some stalls of a couple seconds while typing this in Evolution on
the machine under test. Now it's becoming intolerable, so I aborted the
dbench run so I could finish this email.

This was with 2.5.65-mm2 and elevator=as. I'll repeat soon with
elevator=deadline. I didn't try typing in Evolution with 2.5.65-bk
under high loads, so I'll also give that a try.

Summary: using ext3, the simple window shake and scrollbar wiggle tests
were much improved, but really using Evolution left much to be desired.

Steven