Dear all, for quite a while now, I have experienced this issue with some curiosity; yesterday I had it again, when a program that took well over one hour before only needed about ten minutes, after a system reboot (recent Ubuntu) and with no browser started -- finally deciding to post this.
I still can't reproduce these effects, but there is indication it is connected with browser use (mostly Google Chrome, with usually 10's of windows and ~100 folders open) and especially use of video players; closing or killing doesn't seem to set free resources, a reboot or at least suspend to disk seems to be necessary (suspend to RAM doesn't seem enough). Roughly, I would say the differences in runtime can reach a factor as much as 1:10 at many times -- and so I am curious whether this subject has already been observed or even better discussed elsewhere. I have spoken to somebody, and our only plausible conclusion was that software like web browsers is able to somewhat aggressively claim system resources higher in the privilege hierarchy (cache?? register??), so that they are not available to other programs any more. I hope this is interesting to others, too, I guess it is an issue for anybody programming computation intensive code to be run on standard systems with other applications running there, too, and having to predict the estimated runtime to the client. Maybe I have overseen some libs which are already able to scan the system state in this regard, or even tell Haskell to behave 'less nice' when other applications are known to be of lower priority?? Thanks a lot in advance, Nick
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