Re: Xorg + Ratpoison setup

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Robert Bradbury wrote:
> New user question.

[snip]

Hi Robert,

I might be able to add something to this particular bit:

> The problem I am wrestling with is that normal user window operations
> (Firefox under Gnome (really X)) tend to become unusable when running
> lengthy system builds (even "niced" system builds) but that during the
> same builds normal terminal operations (e.g. top and vmstat under
> splitvt) do not suffer from the same poor response times).

I've had similar problems and my solution was to change the real time
priorities of some processes. It has worked excellently so far (on
Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux), with the (unfortunate) exception of firefox
(if you try to run firefox with any real time priority set, it will call
abort(). I have no idea why.) It is *much* more effective than using
nice() because if any process at a higher RT priority wants to run, it
will always get to run. It also effects the priority of disk access.

The setup I use is to set up /etc/security/limits to allow my user to
use rtprio up to 50:

samb             -       rtprio          50

Then run the X server at a priority of RR 40, ratpoison at RR 30 and
some other things at 30 or 20 (terminals, my music player). It's a
little tricky to set up but now I can run as much as I want (e.g. 20
compiler jobs on my 4 core machine) and it never lags my consoles or
makes my music skip.

The hacks to get all this in are pretty small but tricky. Let me know if
you need details. It's important to run your xterms high but make sure
when they launch big commands (e.g. your make or whatever) that they use
a lower priority (usually you want the normal scheduler "O").

You can experiment without hacking any config by using the "chrt"
command to tweak the priorities of already running processes. See the
man page :-)

Sam.
- --
Sam Bobroff | [email protected] | M5 Networks
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