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Date:      Wed, 22 Dec 1999 20:52:42 -0600
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@HiWAAY.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Process Scheduling (was: Re: Sys Admin article on Linux emulation) 
Message-ID:  <199912230252.UAA57478@nospam.hiwaay.net>
In-Reply-To: Message from Lowell Gilbert <lowell@world.std.com>  of "22 Dec 1999 08:17:20 EST." <rd61z8funbz.fsf@world.std.com> 

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Moved to -questions "because I want to know". Please cc: me
(dkelly@hiwaay.net) as I'm not subscribed to -questions and its probably
not wise to with the holidays forthcoming with less time to pay
attention to massive volumes of email.

Lowell Gilbert writes:
> David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> writes:
> 
> > Would have hoped/expected a process at maximum niceness would not run at
> > all if a normal-nice process wanted to run.
> 
> No, "nice"d processes should not get completely frozen out.
> What you're describing is idprio(1).

Reason I bring it up is with a P-II 400 and 3.2-RELEASE I had one of 
the last rc5des (before they got named dnetc) crunchers running. With 
"systat -v" was watching "cvs checkout" run. The CVS archive was on a 
mostly empty 7G partition on one SCSI HD, writing to another mostly 
empty large partition on another. Both were on the same AIC7890 family 
U2LVD controller on an Asus P2B-S MB. Drives are UW, not LVD.

Anyway, cvs had less than 5% of the CPU. Drives were doing about 200k 
bytes/sec. Rc5des had the other 95%. Killed rc5des and drives moved up 
to about 500k/sec. Did not have softupdates enabled. Also I didn't take 
good notes, but cvs ran about 3 times faster once rc5des was stopped.

Am pretty sure it was a situation where cvs had very little to do once 
it got a time slice then yeilded it when it blocked for I/O. Rc5des got 
the remainder of the slice. Started the next slice. I/O completed. And 
I suspect cvs had to wait until rc5des used all its slice before 
getting a chance at the incoming data.

That machine was scheduled for a wipe and update last month. Maybe I'll 
get around to it next week.  :-)

My PPro (oc'ed to 210) with only one 9G HD for both target and
destination seems to run cvs faster than the P-II 400. Have a newer
FreeBSD on the PPro. Also have softupdates enabled. Other differences is
the PPro has X running all the time, the P-II doesn't have X installed
at all. One would think that would be in favor of the P-II.

Anyway, one of the things about rtprio and family that I don't 
understand is why a plain user can't use such to decrease the priority 
of his own processes? Or that a process can't decrease itself. The way 
nice can be used?

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.




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