Re: O(1) scheduler starvation

[Mike Galbraith]

At 11:30 PM 6/18/2003 +0200, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
>On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 17:54, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> > >To make XMMS skip, just force the X server to do a lot of repainting,
> > >for example, by dragging a big window slowly enough over another one
> > >which requires a lot of painting (Evolution, for example, is a good
> > >candidate as it requires a lot of CPU to repaint uncovered areas). It's
> > >easy to reproduce just after launching XMMS. However, after a while, it
> > >gets difficult to make XMMS to skip sound (it seems the scheduler
> > >adjusts priorities well enough). This is on a PIII 700Mhz laptop with no
> > >niced processes at all.
> >
> > Thanks.  I don't have evolution on my linux box (pine/vi/procmail
> > rules).  ImageMagic ought to give X more than enough spurts of frenetic
> > activity though.  Do you have that, and does image manipulation make xmms
> > stutter as well?  Just moving windows around and changing backgrounds
> > doesn't do anything here.  (500mhz piii/128mb ram btw)
>
>In fact, I can only make XMMS skip sound for a very brief period, just
>after starting it up. After a few seconds, it seems the dynamic
>priorities are adjusted and I can't make XMMS skip sound anymore. To
>reproduce it, open up a big window, then launch XMMS and make it play
>some MP3 file. Then, start moving the big window around. For me, this
>causes XMMS to skip sound for a brief period of time (~5 seconds,
>approx).

If you bump CHILD_PENALTY up (to say 75) you should see a marked improvement.

         -Mike