[Popcon-developers] Popcon takes over my PC

[ironscf@nashuaisp.co.za (Charles Irons)]

Hello Michael and Bill

I waited about 15 - 20  minutes this morning for popcon to finish.  My
desktop processor is Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz with 938 Mb RAM
That made me read your email again.
That made me read nice vs ionice, again

> >> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=483465

As a retired end user of Ubuntu 12.04 Linux I don't have the skills to apply patches to scripts even if I knew which one.
Also the discussion in that posting made me wonder what is best.

So gentlemen, please tell me what consequences I would have if I uninstalled popcon?

Thanks for helping. Kind regards Chas.I

-- 
irons.charles at gmail.com
Home +2711 782 8623
Mobile +2783 588 0028 
***************************** 

On Fri, 2014-01-17 at 10:44 +0100, Michael Bunk wrote:

> Hello Bill, hello Charles,
> 
> >> Installing anacron instead of cron would not solve your problem.  It
> >> would just make sure that cronjobs that could not run when your computer
> >> is switched off do run later when it is on again.
> >>
> >> Your problem is related to nice vs ionice, see
> >> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=483465
> > 
> > Do you have personal experience with this slowdown ?
> > I am willing to reconsider applying the patch in 483465,
> > if I am sure it fix a practical problem.
> 
> Sorry, no.  I was overly optimistic regarding my insight to this
> problem.  All machines where I have popcon running are virtual machines
> powerful enough for popcon to finish in a short time, leaving barely
> visible traces in system monitoring (system load shown by munin for
> example).  Nice and/or ionice are not necessary for them.
> 
> Anyways, since Cha(rle)s has a problem, he should really try one patch
> from 483465, to see whether it helps.  I also think he has anacron
> already installed, because it is unlikely his PC is running at 6:47 in
> the morning...
> 
> I also wonder, why Charles said "The priority is shown as very low",
> because cron does not apply any nice/ionice setting and anacron doesn't
> anymore since 2.3-17 (29 Mar 2012), see
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=373950
> 
> So if he had an anacron < 2.3-17, some nice setting would be applied by
> /etc/anacrontab... and it doesn't help.
> 
> But then, from ionice(1):
> 
> "Note that before kernel 2.6.26 a process that has not asked for an I/O
> priority formally  uses "none"  as  scheduling class, but the I/O
> scheduler will treat such processes as if it were in the best-effort
> class.  The priority within the best-effort class will be dynamically
> derived from the CPU nice level of the process: io_priority = (cpu_nice
> + 20) / 5."
> 
> That means, Charles' popcon would already be running with ionice "none:
> prio 4" (current versions of ionice output "unknown: prio 4", which is
> another small bug, https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/pull/46 ).
> 
> So my analysis supports Bill's resistance to 483465...
> 
> Best regards,
>  Michael
> 
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