Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 09:52:40PM +1200, Robin Sheat wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 08:06:32AM +0000, Mathieu L wrote:
> > I'd like to know for those who have tried 2.6 if they really think it's
> > worth it for a workstation only? Is there any drawback compared to 2.4?
> > According to the article, 2.6 seems to be a bit slower to compile stuff,
> > isn't that quite relevant for Sourcemage running on a workstation?
> Depends. In 2.6, I find large programs like Mozilla pull themselves out of 
> swap a lot faster, but heavy CPU usage by some things (like konq rendering 
> a page) is prone to causing my music player to skip. However, for a desktop 
> system, I think it is overall a bit better.

It definitely feels much more responsive on my desktop, i would never
switch back to 2.4.
I never had my music player skip due to cpu load, only under high disk
load, because i use players that don't buffer the data (madplay,
ogg123).
In 2.6 the scheduler is much more aggressive with nice levels, so
changing the nice level in sorcery to a lower value has made sorcery
commands behave as before (with nice 10 i could easily stall a scribe
reindex by running a compile as normal user).

With 2.6.1 i had some weird startup behaviour of mplayer if the system
was under heavy load, it took some seconds for the scheduler to notice
that mplayer was an interactive app, so it skipped some frames at the
beginning. Haven't seen that with 2.6.3 yet though.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org