Re: [ANNOUNCE] RSDL completely fair starvation free interactive cpu scheduler

[Shawn Starr <shawn.starr@rogers.com>]

On Monday 05 March 2007 10:13, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> Con,
>
> I've now given it a try with HZ=250 on my dual-athlon. It works
> beautifully. I also quickly checked that playing mp3 doesn't skip during
> make -j4, and that gears runs fairly smoothly, since those are the
> references people often use.
>
> But with real work, it's excellent too. When I saturate my CPUs by
> injecting HTTP traffic on haproxy, the load is stable and the command line
> perfectly responsive, while in the past the load would oscillate and the
> command line sometimes stopped to respond for a few seconds.
>
> I've also launched my scheddos program (you may remember, the one we did a
> few experiments with). I could not cause any freeze at all. Plain 2.6.20
> had already improved a lot in this area, but above 4 processes/CPU,
> occasional short freezes did still occur. This time, even at 100 processes,
> the system was rather slow (of course!) but just as expected, and nothing
> more.
>
> I also tried the good old "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1|...|dd bs=1 of=/dev/null"
> and it did not cause any trouble.
>
> I will boot 2.6 slightly more often to test the code under various
> conditions, and I will recommend it to a few people I know who tend to
> switch back to 2.4 after one day full of 2.6 jerkiness.
>
> Overall, you have done a great job !
>
> I hope that more people will give it a try, first to help find possible
> remaining bugs, and to pronounce in favour of its inclusion in mainline.

Hi Con/Willy, 

Just to chime on this thread, I've been testing Con's scheduler patches since 
he mentioned them to me. I have to say for desktop performance all processes 
running remain responsive (although with more resource hungry processes 
things get slower but remain responsive, but expected).  I have also been 
testing his scheduler on my work power workstation running 4 VMs with 4GB of 
ram on a dual-core EM64T box, again RSDL performs rather well balancing VM 
resources even while I have xmms running, xchat, beryl and a bunch of other 
stuff.  There is total response to each process.

Thanks, 
Shawn.