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Re: X under heavy load



On Friday 14 October 2005 18.54, Marc Brünink wrote:
> Hi,
>
> if I put my 500 Mhz machine under heavy load, X doesn't respond
> anymore. Actually it works, but it's much to slow. I want to do some
> hard calculations in background AND use X. I guess this should be
> possible, shouldn't it?
> I tryed to use nice 20 heavy-load-process but this didn't help a bit.
> Is process scheduler of Linux just crap? Is this a problem of X? What
> should I try next?

I find Linux much more responsive than for example Windows 2000 which we 
use at work. I can't do anything else if I am unzipping large files, or 
performing any other heavy task at the same time. In Linux it's no 
problem unzipping file at the same time I am playing a video etc.

What kernel are you using? 2.6 has the option CONFIG_PREEMPT which is said 
to make the gui more responsive and should be enabled for desktop 
systems. Also, you want to make sure you have DMA enabled on your hard 
drives. Execute hdparm /dev/hdX on each hard drive and look for 
using_dma. The same tool can be used to activate it. When DMA is 
disabled, it can really affect the performance.

-- 
Olle Eriksson
mail@olle-eriksson.com | http://www.olle-eriksson.com



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