Re: [BENCHMARK] 2.5.46-mm1 with contest

[Andrew Morton]

Alan Willis wrote:
> 
> > Why?  We are preempting during the generic file write/read routines, I
> > bet, which can otherwise be long periods of latency.  CPU is up and I
> > bet the throughput is down, but his test is getting the attention it
> > wants.
> 
>   I'm curious, would running contest after a fresh boot and with profile=2
> provide a profile that tells exactly where time is being spent?  Since
> about 2.5.45 I've had some strange slow periods, and starting aterm
> would take a while, redrawing windows in X would slow down, it 'feels'
> like my workstation becomes a laptop that is just waking up.  Sometimes
> this is after only a few minutes of inactivity, or after switching
> virtual desktops in kde, or when I have alot of aterm instances running.

- Run `vmstat 1', and see if the slowdowns coincide with any unusual
  IO activity.

- Could be the scheduler.  Try
  renice -19 $(pidof X) $(pidof aterm) $(pidof other stuff)