Re: [RFC] renicing X

[Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>]

Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:

>On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 18:00, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
>>My scheduler patch really benefits a lot from renicing X. I
>>think its because it nices more nicely. Any reasons why this
>>might be a bad idea?
>>

Hi Felipe,
Sorry I can't mail you directly. Some spam filter doesn't like me.

>
>Well, not for me... Although renicing X with Con patches makes X feel
>horrible, with your patches is not as horrible. However, I feel X much
>smoother with X reniced at +0. Renicing X at -20, for example, may
>reduce mouse cursor jumpiness under load, but makes X feel a little
>jerky in general (window movement is not as smooth as with X niced at
>+0). This is, however, based on subjective testing, not actual numbers.
>

Hmm interesting. Might be a bug...

>
>But for interactivity, most of the time it's the subjective feeling of
>the user about the system what matters, not numbers.
>

Yep

>
>And now we're talking about sched-policy-7a: under heavy load, spawning
>new processes still takes twice the time it takes when the system is
>under no load. For example, spawning a new Konsole session (not a new
>Konsole process, but a new session tab inside Konsole) takes approx. 1
>second on my P3-700Mhz. However, with sched-policy-7a and under heavy
>load (the mad while true; do a=2; done loop), it takes more than 2
>seconds.
>

OK thanks. I'll try to work on this.

>
>In general, sched-policy-7a feels extremely smooth and responsive in
>general but, for me, Con patches offer the smoothest X experience I have
>ever felt until date. Anyways, I will keep testing your patches and I
>greatly encourage you to keep improving them. It's always good to have
>diversity :-)
>

Well thats good. Thanks very much.