Re: Anyone working on 2.0.pre31-3?
Greg Stark (gsstark@mit.edu)
03 Aug 1997 03:23:39 -0400
It sounds like the problem at least in the xboard case was memory starvation,
not cpu load. The CPU is not the only scarce resource in a computer, memory
and io bandwidth are both likely to cause a machine to become unresponsive, in
many cases long before cpu load becomes a problem. The load average number is
handy but not really a precise measurement of how unusuable the machine is.
You can avoid the vfork error by increasing your swap space, but the machine
will still become unresponsive because it will take a long time swapping in
and out xboard processes between handling your keyboard io. I think the
scheduler inhereits the BSD approach of prefering interactive processes but
that only goes so far.
greg