Re: Strange load issues with 2.5.69/70 in both -mm and -bk trees.

[Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>]

At 11:08 AM 6/4/2003 -0400, Tom Sightler wrote:

> > >Yes, I thought the same thing, and I did just that, but no, it doesn't
> > >fix the latency issue.  This system has very little running, I made sure
> > >that there were no sound servers such as esd or arts running, nothing.
> > >Basically, a plain KDE (with artsd disabled), mozilla, and Crossover
> > >wine plugin.  Even though I couldn't see how it would affect anything I
> > >tried bumping up the priorities of other processes such as mozilla
> > >itself, X, etc.  Nothing fixed the problem except for lowering the
> > >priority of the wine process.
> >
> > Feel like trying something else for grins?  If it's thud.c type starvation
> > you're seeing, the attached club should beat it into submission.
>
>I gave this a try this morning and it still doesn't seem to solve my
>issue.  I have no idea what is going on with this particular scenario.
>For now I've fixed it with a simple wrapper script that start up wine
>with a '15' nice level.

Ok, at least we know what it's not.  (_slightly_ better than complete unknown;)

>I did do some playing, it seems the problem mostly goes away right
>around nice level 8, before that I seen no noticable difference, after
>that it seems completely gone.  Would there be anything special about
>that range?

A queue's a queue.  What likely matters is what's above there.

>I do have one, probably wildly incorrect theory.  Most of the problems
>I'm seeing seem to revolve around issues when there is a fairly CPU and
>graphics intensive application running.  In this case flash has lots of
>glitzy stuff happening, interactive menus popping up using lots of
>graphics and sound, etc., while in the meantime wine is using lots of
>CPU to keep these things all working.  It almost seems that it's the
>combination of the two of them that leave too little time for sound to
>be played correctly.
>
>As a test of this idea I simply reniced the X server to 19 and the
>problem did get a LOT better, although it did not go completely away.  I
>could make the problem go completely away with the X server niced at 19
>and wine niced at 5.  With X at it's normal 0 nice level I had to renice
>wine to 8 before the problem was corrected.

Can you send me (offline) some top output while it's bust and working to 
ponder?

>This seems to match up with the issue that some people have noted that
>their XMMS skips during virtual desktop switched, etc.

Hmm.  I thought the TIMESLICE_GRANULARITY change that's in mm fixed those.

>I'm not sure if any of that helps anything really, or if there is really
>a "correct" fix for this, or even if this behavior would be considered
>broken.
>
>I've corrected it for now with some simple wrapper scripts to set nice
>levels on the offending processes.  So far this works great.

That's good, but you shouldn't need to.

>  I'll gladly test any other patches, suggestions.

Good.  I do have another rock I'd like to throw at it, but I need to play 
with the idea some more first.  I'll drop you a line privately if I can 
convince it to work as intended.

         -Mike