--- I was running 2 copies of setiathome on a 4 CPU server @ work. The two processes ran nice'd -19. The builds we were running still took 20-30% longer as opposed to when setiathome wasn't running (went from 45 minutes up to about an hour). This machine has 1G, so I don't think it was hurting from swapping.I finally wrote a script that checked every 30 seconds -- if the load on the machine climbed over '4', the script would SIGSTOP the seti jobs. Once the load on the machine fell below 2, it would send a SIGCONT to them.
I was also running setiathome on my laptop for a short while -- but the fan kept coming on and the computer would get really hot. So I stopped that. Linux @ idle doesn't seem to ever kick on the fan, but turn on a CPU cruching program and it sure seemed to heat up the machine. I still wonder how many kilo or mega watts go to running dispersed computation programs. Just one of those things I may never know....
-l
-- The above thoughts and | They may have nothing to do with writings are my own. | the opinions of my employer. :-) L A Walsh | Trust Technology, Core Linux, SGI law@sgi.com | Voice: (650) 933-5338 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/