Subject: Time slices on linux
From: Christian Jaeger (christian.jaeger@sl.ethz.ch)
Date: Sun Sep 03 2000 - 08:23:23 MDT
Hello
Anyone else 'suffering' from this under mol?: it's not really very usable
as soon as anything is going on under the rest of linux (even if it's only
swapping memory on behalf of mol).
Maybe swapping of mol's own memory is special in that the processor cannot
run the code being swapped for that moment, but other cases should be easy
to handle more smoothly, I would think.
The following shows the problem:
Give mol a lower priority (to make the problem appear stronger). Run a
process using the CPU constantly, i.e. "perl -e 'while(1){}'", then switch
to mol. When moving the mouse, the pointer stands still every half second
or so.
(I give mol a lower priority because I have some Mac applications running
that are not releasing cpu correctly when idle.)
From this I would conclude that linux only switches (time-slices) between
processes only every 0.2 seconds or so, but that seems very slow. If this
is really the case, can one configure linux to switch faster to get a more
smooth result?
If anyone has a link to some info about linux's task managing/realtime or
not realtime etc. features, I would be interested to hear about it. I.e.
xmms seems very good in doing a realtime job even without switching to root
or changing priority. How does it do that?
(BTW I run mol 0.9.41 on kernel 2.2.15pre11)
Christian.
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