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Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 22:23:05 +0200
From: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>
To: Scott Sipe <css3@duke.edu>
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Subject: Re: Sched_Ule
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On (2003/10/09 00:28), Scott Sipe wrote:

> Anything that seems disk intensive: bzip2 (unbzip2ing one big file makes
> this happen), making world, building ports, etc makes my X environment
> practically unusable.  Mouse stutters, reaction times is very slow, feels
> 10x more sluggish than normal.  (I'm running KDE if anyone is curious).

A number of us are seeing this problem, and not all of us are entry
level end-users.  I'm using a single PIII with 1GB of RAM and maxusers
0.  No Hyper-threading, nothing interesting in the kernel (apart from
I686_CPU only, KTRACE and _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING).

The problem (as I recall) is that Jeff hasn't received reports from
people who can dig into the problem and have the time to do so.

For example, I'm pretty sure I could at least point a finger at the
problem if I had time.  But I'm under heavy pressure, and so the only
solution that's feasible for me is to just switch to SCHED_4BSD and keep
moving.

What surprises me is that Jeff can't reproduce it.

For me, the sluggish mouse problem manifests under these conditions:

1) Use a USB mouse, not a PS2 mouse.
2) SCHED_ULE in the kernel.
3) make buildworld (no -j necessary, but -k exacerbates the problem).
4) Fiddle around in X (no particular window manager required).

Ciao,
Sheldon.