Re: OT: performance problems.
On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 04:52:14PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
| folks, sorry if i am posting this here, but i am sort of clueless, and
| i'd love some advise from you wise people!
|
| i have this AMD Thunderbird 1.3 GHz machine with 512Mb of SD-RAM, a 1Gb
| swap partition on a 20Gb 5400 seagate IDE drive. that's quite powerful,
| isn't it?
|
| Linux piper 2.4.9 #1 Tue Sep 11 15:39:28 CEST 2001 i686 unknown
| 16:45:25 up 13 days, 1:17, 7 users, load average: 3.40, 3.56, 3.70
| 84 processes: 83 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
| CPU states: 0.8% user, 22.3% system, 1.0% nice, 75.9% idle
| Mem: 505844K total, 502788K used, 3056K free, 11456K buffers
| Swap: 996020K total, 31172K used, 964848K free, 438552K cached
|
| however, i am continuously having troubles. for instance, in a typical
| situation, i'd have windowmaker running with four terms, xmms playing
| some 192kbps MP3s, some ssh sessions into it, and an rsync, bzip/gzip,
| or make-kpkg process running. i am not usually interactively using X.
|
| in such a situation, xmms (or mpg123 without X, it doesn't matter)
| continuously skips on MP3s and it's *very* annoying.
yeah, sometimes xmms skips on me (PIII 500/600 laptop)
| i even went as far as to renice xmms to -20 *and*
| rsync/bzip/gzip/make-kpkg to 20, but it doesn't really help.
|
| this is ridiculous. a 1.3 GHz machine should really be able to handle
| two intense processes at the same time, after all, UNIX is a true
| time-sharing OS. but i am at a loss why this thing is unable to handle
| two processes.
Well, kernel compilation is very CPU intensive, and bzip2 can do lots
of computation as well. What you have is several (not just two) CPU
intensive processes going, and one process that needs real-time CPU
access. Unix is a time-sharing, but not real-time OS. xmms just gets
lucky if it doesn't skip. This is true for the general case of any
process that needs real-time-like scheduling. Of course, the less
load you have on your machine the more likely it is that xmms will be
scheduled often enough.
That load average you have is way higher than mine is, except for when
I'm doing a lot of development (compiling/running some java stuff,
which is when xmms has trouble for me). The system is still quite
responsive for non-real-time and non-cpu-intensive activities (like
reading/writing email).
-D
--
A Microsoft Certified System Engineer is to information technology as a
McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to the culinary arts.
Michael Bacarella commenting on the limited value of certification.
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