Peter Seebach wrote:
> In message <20021218142059.0ff9798b.ggm@apnic.net>, George Michaelson writes:
> >So, from the general "big file I/O makes it slow" I'm  honing in on "X is
> >really not good in the jobmix here". -Is this maybe something fixable in X, or
> >in the way I run X? I self-compiled from /usr/xsrc.
> 
> FWIW, my system having this problem is a P4 2Ghz with 640MB.
> Mozilla cannot coexist with, say, cvs update... but that's ridiculous,
> because even if Mozilla is taking 100MB of memory, I should be able to eke out
> an existance with only a couple hundred MB of disk cache.
> 
> -s

These are most likely scheduler inefficiencies.`

Okay, one thing I heard is P4 has worse context switch performarmance
compared to other chips. Other than that, Linux doesn't have such a
great scheduler either. When this machine is very busy with IO, and there's
plenty of CPU cycles to go around and most RAM free, it's more annoying
than a 16 MHz 386. Nothing like this on the FreeBSD machine. Very
responsive. The Linux scheduler will be fixed in the next kernel version
though. This is 500 MHz Pentium 3 running 2.4.x Linux kernel.