Aaron Lehmann <aaronl@vitelus.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 09:42:03AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > But it was definitely there. 3-5 second _pauses_. Not slowdowns.
>
> I can second this. Using Linux 2.5.5x, untarring a file while
> compiling could cause X to freeze for several seconds at a time.
This may be a VM/block/IO scheduler thing. If the X server is trying to page
some text in and the disk is busy writing some stuff out then yes, the X
server can freeze for some time.
Of course, a ton of work has gone into this problem, and more work continues
to be done.
If your machine has a small amount of memory, or is heavily overcommitted
then it is more likely to happen.
Using the CFQ or AS IO schedulers will help a bit. And decreasing
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness may help too.
I'd be interested in feedback on the latter. The default policy of 60% seems
to be about right for the 128M to 256M desktops, but I am running 85% on
larger memory machines so that a bit more stuff gets paged out.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 07 2003 - 22:00:35 EST