On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 01:41, Andrew Morton wrote:
> It's pretty easy to demonstrate the benefit of the balance_dirty_pages()
> change. Just do:
>
> while true
> do
> dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=512 conv=notrunc
> done
>
> and also:
>
> rm 1 ; sleep 3; time dd if=/dev/zero of=1 bs=16M count=1
>
> The 16M dd normally takes 1.5 seconds (I'm pretty please with that btw.
> Very repeatable and fair). If you run the 16M dd with SCHED_FIFO it takes
> a repeatable 0.12 seconds.
This is what I did. Same results, basically.
What I did not do was prove that the xmms stalls went away for those who
were seeing that.
> So running a program off disk isn't a very good test.
No, its not. And in general, real-time tasks should not do disk I/O (at
least not via their core RT thread). And they should mlock() their
memory.
But circumstances do differ, and these changes are in the right
direction, I think. It also means e.g. someone can make xmms or whatever
real-time, and hopefully avoid the memory-related stalls that spawned
the discussion and this patch.
Robert Love
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 07 2003 - 22:00:34 EST