Tuning the scheduler? Desktop with a CPU-intensive task becomes rapidly unusable.

[Michal Varga]

On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 14:03 -0500, Jim Bryant wrote:
> i just noticed this too...  had a build going of qt-creator, and then 
> started a /usr/src make clean, and had to abort the qt-creator build to 
> get the make clean to finish.  it was taking forever to even paint the 
> xterm in the make clean window.

This has been the state of -stable for at least an year, I have yet to
see a 7-stable machine that doesn't exhibit this behavior. This wasn't
the case with 7 in the very beginning and only started slowly building
up over time, particularly around the time of one specific xorg import -
which one it was? 7.4? I guess. Every bit of performance went down the
drain hole by that time and it's on that same level ever since (it's
rather easy to get used to it while working on a 7-stable desktop, but
would be nice having the old pre-ULE performance levels back, sometime).

On the other hand, at least from some of my observations, the terrible
desktop performance isn't strictly CPU-bound, I/O definitely has some
say in this. You can (you should, mileage may vary) see this by trying
to extract a few-GB archive in the background. While clearly no more
than a single CPU is ever occupied by that process (and there's few
other happily idling), you can spend waiting up to a few minutes just to
get a new application launched (or even just a running one getting
redrawn, in case part of it was swapped out at the moment).

But as I said, for 7-stable, this has been the case for a veeeeeery long
time.

m.

-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)