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Date:      Tue, 10 Sep 1996 19:22:28 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        lars@elbe.desy.de (Lars Gerhard Kuehl)
Cc:        Duncan.Barclay@pa-consulting.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: undocumented kernel priority changing
Message-ID:  <199609100952.TAA05559@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <9609100927.AA06740@elbe.desy.de> from "Lars Gerhard Kuehl" at Sep 10, 96 11:27:07 am

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Lars Gerhard Kuehl stands accused of saying:
> 
> For sites with only a few active processes that isn't a problem at all.
> (No competition.) If there are many active processes 'renicing' is highly
> desirable. The limit is usually reached only by jobs submitted
> with 'interactive' nice levels. It might be an advantage to increase
> the limit if someone likes to use xemacs on a 16MHz 386SX.
> (10 minutes cpu time even on a 100 MHz 586 is pretty a lot ;)

It's peanuts for long-lived processes in any sort of 'embedded' application:

mstradar:/home/radar>uptime
11:49AM  up 23:35, 3 users, load averages: 0.19, 0.27, 0.25
mstradar:/home/radar>ps ax
...
 8651  ??  SN    36:01.06 /home/radar/rd12/libexec/FreeBSD/exptd -f /home/radar
 3303  p0- SN    83:44.55 /usr/local/rsi/idl//bin/bin.linux/idl analysis_init

As you can see, it's been up less than a day, and the current load is pretty
low.  Depending on configuration, with just these two running the system
will push a load average of 1.8 or more nonstop.  (These two also normally
start out of /etc/rc.local, so they've been restarted some time after
the system booted.)

Your point about only having a few processes is quite valid though - there's
no problem with either responsiveness or overall performance there.

> Lars

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496       [[
]] realtime instrument control          (ph/fax)  +61-8-267-3039        [[
]] Collector of old Unix hardware.      "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick  [[



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