Re: #define HZ 1024 -- negative effects

[Mark Hahn]

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> > Are there any negative effects of editing include/asm/param.h to change 
> > HZ from 100 to 1024? Or any other number? This has been suggested as a 
> > way to improve the responsiveness of the GUI on a Linux system. Does it 
...
> Why not just run the X server at a realtime priority?  Then it will get
> to respond to existing events, such as keyboard and mouse input,
> promptly without creating lots of superfluous extra clock interrupts.
> I think you will find this is a better solution.

it's surprisingly ineffective; usually, if someone thinks responsiveness
is bad, there's a problem with the system.  for instance, if the system
is swapping, setting X (and wm, and clients) to RT makes little difference,
since the kernel is stealing pages from them, regardless of their scheduling
priority.

if you're curious, you might be interested in two toy programs
I've attached.  one is "setrealtime", which will make a pid RT, or else act
as a wrapper (ala /bin/time).  I have it installed suid root on my system,
though this is rather dangerous if your have lusers around.  the second is a
simple memory-hog: mmaps a bunch of ram, and keeps it active (printing out a
handy measure of how long it took to touch its pages...)

regards, mark hahn.

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