Re: [gentoo-user] Re: cgroupd really do work!

[William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>]

On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 11:52 -0800, walt wrote:
> On 12/03/2010 04:41 PM, William Kenworthy wrote:
> > Re the discussion on cgroups on the 24/25 november - on my old AMD
> > barton 2500+ desktop - in the past a load of anything more than 5 made
> > it very painful to use.  Add in running windows in a qemu vm at the same
> > time (all in 1.5G ram) and its almost unusable as an interactive
> > desktop.
> >
> > Now, with Florians (thanks for the scripts) version of using it on
> > gentoo, even at a load in excess of 12, its almost as good as with no
> > load for desktop operations!
> >
> > To get the high load I am compiling a new kernel, running win2k in qemu,
> > emerging latest updates, browsing the web and reading email in
> > evolution, running updatedb and other cron jobs (just restarted after a
> > tuxonice hibernate so everything is triggering at once!).
> 
> I would expect some disk swapping activity when running all those apps in
> 1.5GB of RAM.  Are you seeing any?
> 
> 

yes, a lot as expected (multiple disks using LVM) so no attempt to
configure the disks for high performance.  The compiles were quite slow,
but thats fine because I could still use the desktop.  The only
interactive app that didnt work well was the win2k instance running in
qemu - it did work, though slowly, and when the other jobs were over and
it could get more cpu time it came back to around normal.  qemu is
somewhat borderline on this machine in any case - been on it for 6-7
years though :)

Some apps that were swapped out had a very short delay while the pages
were retrieved (mainly noticable on firefox), but the before/after
impression was the difference between a very short pause and what used
to happen - time to take the hand off the mouse and lean back in the
chair and wait for FF to catch up.

Keep in mind this is a relatively low memory, very old/slow 32 bit
system I am using.

and after running this for a couple of days, yes, I am still happy with
it and this gives the old beast a new lease on life :)

BillK

-- 
William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>
Home in Perth!