Re: [patch] "interactivity changes", sched-2.5.64-B2

[David Lang]

sounds like the code in X that detects a key being held down is running
into problems. any chance it's doing a busy loop or something silly like
that that's just not running enough? (probably not, but since you have
problems in a couple applications that happen when you hold a key down I
would look there rather then at the scheduling code itself)

David Lang

 On 7 Mar 2003, Martin Josefsson wrote:

> Date: 07 Mar 2003 21:34:38 +0100
> From: Martin Josefsson <[e-mail]>
> To: Ingo Molnar <[e-mail]>
> Cc: Mike Galbraith <[e-mail]>, Andrew Morton <[e-mail]>,
>      Linus Torvalds <[e-mail]>, Robert Love <[e-mail]>,
>      [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [patch] "interactivity changes", sched-2.5.64-B2
>
> On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 15:43, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> >
> > > >Spiffy :)  /Me thinks desktop users will like this patch a bunch.
> > >
> > > (I can even play asteroids [fly little rocket ship around, shoot at and
> > > ram space rocks] with make -j25 bzImage and some swapping [sucks when
> > > you hit heavy swap of course, but quite playable as long as swap is
> > > light])
> >
> > cool! Could you please also play a bit with various WAKER_BONUS_RATIO
> > values? If the default '0' value is the best-performing variant then i'll
> > nuke it from the patch altogether.
>
> Hi,
>
> I've tested 2.5.64 + sched-2.5.64-B2 on an UP pIII 700 with 704MB ram,
> here's my results...
>
> General impression is that interactivity is good but it seems there's a
> few cases that gets worse, sometimes a lot worse.
>
> First the things that got better...
>
> Xmms doesn't skip when switching tabs in galeon anymore during general
> desktopusage (more on that below)
> Earlier I had to change some schedulersettings to get it to stop
> skipping.
>
> And it was possible to watch a movie using mplayer while running a make
> -j10 on a kerneltree, the playback wasn't 100% perfect but I'd say it
> was ~90% , the jerkyness I saw wasn't very irritating. I tried the
> window wiggle-test while the compile and movie was playing and it was
> smooth and only added a little more jerkyness to the playback.
>
>
> Some negative things:
>
> Xmms could skip during the compile/movie playback, most notably one
> rather long skip right after a song-change but sometimes in the middle
> of a song as well, those skips were quite long as well, 2-3 seconds.
>
> Another xmms related problem is that even without any load on the
> machine the mousepointer gets jerky for 0.1-0.5 seconds right after
> having used the mouse to search forward or backwards in a song. It gets
> jerky at the moment you release the mousebutton.
> Basically no change in the jerkyness even with a make -j10 and movie
> playing.
>
> The biggest problem is the fact that my windowmanager gets unresponsive
> for ~30 seconds when I perform something that works fine with vanilla
> 2.4 and 2.5. I have two keybindings that execute 'aumix -v+3' and
> 'aumix -v-3'. And if I hold one of those buttons down for say 2 seconds
> then at first it seems like nothing is happening but then the volume
> starts to inc-/decrease sloowly and the windowmanager (sawfish) is
> unresponsive for ~30 seconds. With 2.4 or vanilla 2.5 the change in
> volume is instant and I've never noticed that sawfish got unresponsive.
> Sure holding the button down for 2 seconds at a repeatrate of 30/s will
> cause a lot of aumix's to be executed but 30 seconds for 60 aumix's is
> quite a long time. A few times it has been enough to just press one of
> those keys a few times to get the exact same effect. It's as if sawfish
> goes into a weird loop. All this might be a bug in sawfish...
> This behaviour is the same with or without the compile/movie running.
>
> Another problem is that the composer-window in evolution gets
> unresponsive for 1-2 seconds if you hold down a key, and when it gets
> responsive again it gets all the keypresses...
>
> I've tried changing WAKER_BONUS_RATIO but I didn't see any diffrence.
> At least it didn't help with the Xmms mouse-jerkyness or the
> sawfish_goes_out_for_coffee_and_a_cigarette problem.
>
> There, that was my impressions of 2 hours usage of the patch.
>
> --
> /Martin
>
> Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
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