interactive task starvation

[Mike Galbraith]

On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 10:06 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:

> yep, i think that's a good idea. In the worst case the starvation 
> timeout should kick in.

(I didn't want to hijack that thread ergo name change)

Speaking of the starvation timeout...

I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be a good idea to always have an
expired_timestamp to ensure that there is a limit to how long
interactive tasks can starve _each other_.  Yesterday, I ran some tests
with apache, and ended up waiting for over 3 minutes for a netstat|
grep :81|wc -l to finish when competing with 10 copies of httpd.  The
problem with the expired_timestamp is that if there is nobody already
expired, and if no non-interactive task exists, there's certainly no
expired_timestamp, there's no starvation limit. 

There are other ways to cure 'interactive starvation', but forcing an
array switch if a non-interactive task hasn't run for pick-a-number time
is the easiest.

	-Mike

(yup, folks would certainly feel it, and would _very_ likely gripe, so
it would probably have to be configurable)

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