Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 6 Mar 2003 23:00:24 -0800 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: [patch] "HT scheduler", sched-2.5.63-B3 |
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Aaron Lehmann <aaronl@vitelus.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 09:42:03AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > But it was definitely there. 3-5 second _pauses_. Not slowdowns. > > I can second this. Using Linux 2.5.5x, untarring a file while > compiling could cause X to freeze for several seconds at a time.
This may be a VM/block/IO scheduler thing. If the X server is trying to page some text in and the disk is busy writing some stuff out then yes, the X server can freeze for some time.
Of course, a ton of work has gone into this problem, and more work continues to be done.
If your machine has a small amount of memory, or is heavily overcommitted then it is more likely to happen.
Using the CFQ or AS IO schedulers will help a bit. And decreasing /proc/sys/vm/swappiness may help too.
I'd be interested in feedback on the latter. The default policy of 60% seems to be about right for the 128M to 256M desktops, but I am running 85% on larger memory machines so that a bit more stuff gets paged out.
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