ervacon at gmail.com said:
> When the system is largly idle the gnome desktop feels fast and snappy, and
> interaction is very immediate. However, when I start a heavy background
> process (for instance a maven build of a large Java application), CPU
> utilization shoots to 100% on both CPU cores (which is good!), but my whole
> desktop becomes sluggish, even mouse movement becomes erratic.
It's not necessarily CPU contention that's making things slow. My systems
behave this way when RAM is short; Xorg or window-manager get paged out,
and things get jerky/erratic.
> Is there any way to remedy this problem, for instance some way of giving
> all interactive desktop applications a higher priority (like in
> windows), or is this some kind of problem with the OpenSolaris kernel
> process scheduler?
Try this, on your dual-core interactive-use machine:
psradm -i 1
I have an old Pentium-4 machine with hyperthreading enabled; Recently
it occurred to me that this may have similar characteristics to the
UltraSPARC-T1 with CMT. Instead of 8 cores with 4 threads per core,
I have just one core with two threads. Not your situation, but bear
with me....
So, I tried tuning interrupts as recommended for high network throughput
on the T1, and it made a noticeable improvement in windowing response,
on this old P4-HT machine. I'm not sure why, it may just be an accident or
side-effect, an unintentional way of limiting the load on the second thread.
Such things should not be needed on your true dual-core machine, but maybe
there's another resource suffering from contention -- a shared cache,
northbridge bandwidth, context-switching between cores, etc.
Regards,
Marion
