Advanced Process Priority

[DavePrince]

I've not done much with process priorities other than using nice (&ionice) but I've noticed a discrepancy between my gentoo system at home (2.6.27-gentoo-r7) and the ubuntu setup (on similarish hardware) I use at work (2.6.24-23-generic).

Both are quad core CPUs. Both run boinc (nice 19) on all four cores in the background. The boinc processes at work are a lot nicer than the ones at home.

If I tar up a 400MB directory onto /tmp (both mounted on tmpfs so there's no i/o waiting involved) and then run "time pbzip2 -v9" on the tar file the jobs at work get a lot higher share of the CPUs than at home:

time output from ubuntu
65.932u 0.820s 0:17.67 377.7% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

time output from gentoo
84.655u 2.572s 0:42.78 203.8% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

It uses just over 2 of the 4 cores, vs. 3.77 of them at work. It has a similar effect on highly parallelised compile jobs at home, but at work it does even better (boinc hardly gets any CPU time.)

If I turn boinc off on the gentoo system then I get much better performance
73.535u 0.910s 0:19.11 389.5% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

If I do the same on the ubuntu machine it makes only a little difference
64.540u 0.880s 0:16.78 389.8% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

What do I need to look into to get the boinc processes here to give way more?

[pappy_mcfae]

You can set how much memory and CPU time is given to boinc by starting the boinc manager, and changing the settings under Advanced -> Preferences... to whatever you wish.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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[DavePrince]