Marion Hakanson wrote: > 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.
Our original prototype for the IA class back in the early 90s (!) did influence memory allocation, but this wasn't really tenable in a scheduling class. It did work very well, however. http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/cinci93/full_papers/evans.txt True control of RAM given to various processes awaits the VM2.0 project, which is currently underway. Attempts to correctly schedule memory use w/ the current VM system have been unsuccessful despite rather valiant efforts. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts "You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
