On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 12:01:43AM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > I'm running what a normal desktop user self-supporting can expect to have to
> > run. If the mix is 'bad' then its worth noting the interactive response on
> > other BSD variants (FreeBSD) isn't this bad, and on Linux is impercepable by
> > comparison, *for the same job mix*
> 
> You can't expect the default out-of-the-box kernel to be tuned ideally
> for all possible job mixes.  NetBSD seems to work better, "out of the
> box", as a plain multi-user server, not as a "do it all wonder
> workstation".  Maybe those other systems have been tuned to give the GUI
> a bigger share of the resources pie.

[...]

> Still, really, what do you expect when you go about asking your CPU do
> run a whole bunch of very large applications, all which must display
> their updates through another large application, all the while you're
> asking it to work as hard it can at running some compiles and doing some
> I/O intensive wandering about on large portions of your filesystem?
> 
> Something _must_ suffer when you punish your machine that way.  On
> NetBSD it's the Xserver, at least that's what happens "out of the box".

And that is exactly what users notice - interactive performance.

I, for one, would be happier devoting extra CPU cycles to my
interactive apps (phoenix, rxvt, etc) and letting the other stuff
suffer. I don't really care that much if my "make release" takes 3h40
vs. 3h30 if it means really snappy interactive performance.

In the end, it's all about perception. If the user *feels* it is
sluggish, something is not right - perhaps we should publish
"recommended" VM parameters for best interactive X performance, NFS
server, etc.

Your point about not running builds, etc. on workstations is valid,
though not everyone has enough spare hardware to have a separate
build box. However, I don't think that running a build on a
workstation running X is asking too much, depending on hardware of
course.

g.