Mulbreastasking discriminates Mouse and Keyboard how to fix it 5099

Nebur

I had this problem only when running Red Hat Linux 9 on a machine with only 64 Megabytes RAM and running X Window System, GNOME, and whatever window manager it came with. The paging rat was well over 100 pages per second.

Increasing the memory to 128 Megabytes helped that a whole lot, and increasing it to 256 Megabytes put a stop to all that annoyance. Then the only problem was the system was still annoyingly slow, due to the 166 MHz Pentium processor. That was cured by donating the machine to the deserving poor.

That machine was running setiathome which kept the processor load at 100%, but the mouse and keyboard worked OK. It was after typing something and pressing Enter that the delays were a problem. setiathome is compute-limited and only does a tiny bit of IO every few seconds.

I would imagine mysql also does a lot of IO. If you have only one hard drive, then in addition to the memory shortage, you may be getting seek contention on the disk IO system as well. That is why I have 6 hard drives on this machine. I do not use mysql, but IBM's DB2, but the idea is the same.

You should really measure the paging rate. You can see it if you run xosview or you can run vmstat to see that.

I do not know mysql, but I put 4 GBytes on this machine so that database stuff runs better. That way, with some tasks I can get almost the entire index into RAM which speeds things up quite a bit.

If your application does not require transaction logging, turning it off may help. Transaction logging on my machine is to a 7200rpm ATA hard drive (not used by anything else when this is going on), and that is a measured bottleneck. All the data and indices are on 4 10,000rpm Ultra-320 SCSI hard drives. I used to run on another machine with only 10,000rpm Ultra-2 SCSI hard drives, and it ran about 8x slower. In neither case did it really saturate the processors, It usually saturates one processor, and not always. On this machine I have two hyperthreaded 3.06GHz Xeons. The older machine has two 550 MHz Pentium IIIs. Probably not. Get more memory and more hard drives, preferably SCSI. You probably need the memory to avoid excess paging. You need the hard drives, not for the extra storage space, but to avoid seek contention and to permit writing to logs, data areas, and index areas independently.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 07:05:00 up 4 days, 5:26, 3 users, load average: 4.24, 4.22, 4.18