Poor interactive response from the FC2 kernel on SMP hardware?

[Dan Berger]

Well, here's another data point.  I left the stack at 4k when
recompiling the stock kernel (I'm not using the nvidia drivers, so I
figured I'd leave as much as is) so I don't think that's the cause.

I have been much happier with the behavior of the stock kernel than the
one redhat/FC supplied - though the test cycle has been less than 24
hours.  I'll see how I feel a few days from now.

For posterity (the list archive) I'm running

2x PIII 1Ghz
512M RAM
ATI Radeon 9600XT (w/ the ATI drivers)
Blah, blah, blah (as you so succinctly put it ;))

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 23:51 -0700, Benjamin Arai wrote:

> I had some of the same issues but reduced a lot of them by setting the
> default stack size back to 8k.  Fedora set it to 4k mainly to help
> javas performance and that was about it.  Also, the inconsistencies
> you are experiencing with applications may be for the same reason.  I
> am using a dual and it seemed to work fine after re-compiling a
> vanilla kernel.
> 
> Another possibility is that Fedora uses there own asynchronous I/O
> patch, which may conflict with the new 2.6 kernels scheduler. 
> 
> My machine that worked:
>     - 2x Athlon MP
>     - 2GB Registered RAM
>     - NVIDIA ...
>     - Blah blah blah
>     - ...
> 
> These are all guesses...
> 
> On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 21:48, Dan Berger wrote: 
> 
> > Folks - I've been running FC1 with a home-build (stock) 2.6.X kernel
> > for several months without issue.  
> > 
> > I upgraded to FC2 the other night and was immediately struck by the
> > poor interactive performance of the system.  Audio (Ogg) played via
> > rythmbox skips and stutters during I/O, the GUI pauses for "long"
> > periods (where long is > 0), etc.
> > 
> > I just built a stock 2.6.6 kernel using the i686 smp config file
> > shipped with FC2, and performance is much improved.  (I'm typing
> > this, listening to music, and doing a make clean on the kernel tree
> > with no stuttering.)
> > 
> > Have others seen this issue?  Is it known?  A search of this list
> > didn't turn up anything that clearly matched, nor did a search of RH
> > Bugzilla.
> > 
> > Cheers.
> > 


--

...Dan Berger [dberger at oubliette.org]
   http://www.oubliette.org/~dberger
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