[ILUG] X gobbles CPU with online.ie

[Paul Jakma]

On Sat, 11 Nov 2000, Niall O Broin wrote:
> drawing/undrawing dots to slow it own. But the oddity is the second ping. I
> forgot about that - it's a ping -i 30 somewhere which I run when I'm using
> Surf No Limits and I don't want the connection to go down for whatever
> reason. Without the flood ping running, you don't even notice that in top -
> after all, it's only sending 1 packet every 30 seconds. So what on earth's
> happening to it when I run the flood ping ?
> 

the big kernel lock probably if 2.2. ping -f (with no X calls) is now
really hammering at the kernel, and the second ping ends waiting a
lot when asking the kernel to send and listen for reply to a ping.

i take ityour machine is quite slow when you do this? (if not, then
it's not BKL, but a more fine-grained lock).

have a root around in include/asm-i386/entry.S, follow the calls with
find .... -exec grep (typically read() goes to sys-read(), etc..) and
see what kind of locks different paths take. 

on 2.4 i see the slow ping spending a lot of time in wait_for_ (wait
for what, ps cuts it off..).

> Indeed, but if noone scratched itches we'd have no Linux (in
> fact, we'd still be living in caves).
> 

true..

> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Niall

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie
PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt
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