Re: PROBLEM: high load average when idle

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>> not sure this is going to help; I mean, the load gets only updated in actual
>> timer interrupts... and on a tickless system there's very few of those
>> around..... and usually at places round_jiffies() already put a timer on.
> 
> Yeah, you're right. Although in practice, at least on a system running 
> X, I'd expect that there still is lots of other timers going on, hiding 
> the issue.

eh not really; on a normal distro desktop you maybe have 10 
wakeups/sec or so; on a tuned one you have 2 or less.

> 
> Hmm. Maybe Anders' problem stems partly from the fact that he really is 
> using the tweaks to make that tickless theory more true than it tends to 
> be on most systems?

we fixed a TON of stuff over the last months.. standard desktops (F8 / 
next Ubuntu) will be around 10 wakeups/sec, in a lab environment you 
can get below 2 ;)