Re: 2.6.0 performance problems

[Samium Gromoff <deepfire@sic-elvis.zel.ru>]

At Mon, 5 Jan 2004 18:23:54 -0800 (PST),
David Lang wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> 
> >
> > On January 05, 2004 07:33 am, Samium Gromoff wrote:
> > > At Tue, 30 Dec 2003 08:55:00 -0500,
> > >
> > > Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > > > On December 30, 2003 06:41 am, Samium Gromoff wrote:
> > > > > Reality sucks.
> > > > >
> > > > > People are ignorant enough to turn blind eye to obvious vm regressions.
> > > > >
> > > > > No developers run 64M boxens anymore...
> > > >
> > > > No one is turning a blind eye.  Notice Linus has reponded to and is
> > > > interested in this thread.  The vm is not perfect in all cases - in most
> > > > cases it is faster though...
> > >
> > > "in most cases it is faster" is a big lie.
> > >
> > > The reality is: on all usual one-way boxes 2.6 goes slower than 2.4 once
> > > you start paging.
> >
> > I would argue that in most case you do not page or page very little - know that is
> > the case here.
> >
> 
> This may be true of you have lots of memory, but with memory hogs like
> mozilla and openoffice out there anyone who is working on an older machine
> will be pageing, if only for the time it takes for the huge bloated
> desktop app to start and get it's working set into memory.
> 
> things get even worse if you make the mistake of useing Gnome or KDE for
> your desktop.

I`ve timed delta("exec startx", `last io') with 64M RAM on my box.
The desktop consisted of wmaker, several xterms, devhelp (gnome2 app) and
several (3-4) wmaker applets, with devhelp being the hoggiest hog.
I also hade several services in the background, but they`re mostly irrelevant,
due to inactivity.

The discovery was that 2.6.0-test9 was about 1.5x slower to reach the `noio'
state than 2.4.20-pre9.

And no, i don`t use ide on my desktop, so no dma issues there ;-)

> David Lang
> 
> -- 
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

regards, Samium Gromoff