Re: scheduler nice 19 versus 'idle' behavior / static low-priorityscheduling

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Fri Jan 30 2009 - 01:24:21 EST


On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 00:49 -0500, Nathanael Hoyle wrote:

> Recently I installed the Folding@Home client, which many of you may be
> familiar with, intended to utilize spare CPU cycles to perform protein
> folding simulations in order to further medical research. It is not a
> multi-threaded client at this point, so it simply runs four instances on
> my system, since it has four cores. It is configured to run at
> nice-level 19.
>
> Because it is heavily optimized, and needs little external data to
> perform its work, it spends almost all of its time cpu-bound, with
> little to no io-wait or blocking on network calls, etc. I had been
> using it for about a week with no real difficulty until I went to watch
> another DVD and found that the video was slightly stuttery/jerky so long
> as foldingathome was running in the background. Once I shut it down,
> the video playback resumed its normal smooth form.

Sounds like a problem was recently fixed. Can you try 2.6.29-rc3 or
2.6.28.2?

-Mike

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