Re: [alsa-devel] Re: audio latencies, real-time scheduling etc.

Harald Koenig (koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Wed, 30 Jun 1999 08:52:21 +0200


On Jun 29, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:

> >>My tests shows that increasing the scheduling frequency to HZ=1000 ....
> >
> >I feel wary of increasing HZ, but maybe I'll try this out and see how
> >it works for me.
>
> First clarification: increasing HZ has big payoffs for a program like
> your benchmark, which *isn't* burning CPU cycles generating audio in
> real time. But it can be problematic for an application that can use
> every available cycle for its own work, because the ten-fold increase
> in timer interrupt frequency is going to steal cycles. Does anyone
> have any idea how many (x86) cycles it takes to process a timer
> interrupt that doesn't result in any change to the tasks running on
> each CPU ?

quite a while ago I've raised HZ fron 100 to 1024 on an old DX2/66.
comparing kernel compile time (obviously CPU bound with 20MB ram
and ~95% CPU utilisation) there was a slowdown of ~1 min for
a total compile time of ~55 min. so you can see the effect,
but even for a DX2/66 it wasn't bad at all (and it did solve the
problems where I needed HZ >> 100).

Harald

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