Re: sluggish 2.2.1

Rik van Riel (riel@nl.linux.org)
Thu, 4 Feb 1999 21:46:05 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Steve Dodd wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 05, 1999 at 05:38:18AM +1100, Jim Woodward wrote:
>
> > I noticed this with 2.2.1 - at one stage I through the machine had locked
> > solid, but it was just my MRTG cron job running.. mouse under X stopped
> > for about 5 or more seconds.. keyboard didnt respond..
>
> Hmm, I'm running a kernel build in the background now (2.2.2-pre1)
> and I'm sure the interactive response is worse than I would expect
> - window redraws, scrolling in mutt in an rxvt, etc. Some way to
> quantify this sort of thing would be good, but I've no idea where
> to even start...

I believe it's in memory management, and in particular
buffer handling.

Once there are enough dirty disk buffers, the I/O queue
is clogged up and pages from the disk cache are stolen,
including executable pages and important program data.

Something seems to have changed between 2.2.0 and 2.2.1
because the normal/buffer/cache ratio is different on
these two kernels. I haven't had time to investigate this
more, though :(

Rik -- If a Microsoft product fails, who do you sue?
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