Features You Won't Find In The Linux 3.9 Kernel

[BO$$]

Linux still performs better on desktop than Windows does on server.
Linux is still probably the most flexible OS.

So what? I still get choppy mouse movement under heavy load and can't play music continuously.

[duby229]

That sounds very much like a typical PulseAudio installation... Just get rid of it. It is bloatware crap. I run on nothing more than ALSA, and I can put the cpu under intense load and never get any audio lag or skips.

[BO$$]

That sounds very much like a typical PulseAudio installation... Just get rid of it. It is bloatware crap. I run on nothing more than ALSA, and I can put the cpu under intense load and never get any audio lag or skips.

Choppiness in music happens along with mouse choppiness. I don't think that the culprit is PulseAudio.

[deanjo]

Choppiness in music happens along with mouse choppiness. I don't think that the culprit is PulseAudio.

Have you tried? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. The first thing however that I would look at is what the hell is going on in your system that you are hitting the swap that hard in the first place. (BTW, I can easily reproduce the same set of conditions in Windows that you describe when a program goes rogue and springs a nasty memory leak. When that happens, you move the mouse and system starts sputtering all over).

[BO$$]

Have you tried? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. The first thing however that I would look at is what the hell is going on in your system that you are hitting the swap that hard in the first place. (BTW, I can easily reproduce the same set of conditions in Windows that you describe when a program goes rogue and springs a nasty memory leak. When that happens, you move the mouse and system starts sputtering all over).

For example resuming after sleep having AMD drivers installed. Due to a bug it first moves all memory to swap and then back in the memory. During that time the system is unusable. The mouse is mainly dead and can't listen to anything.

Other times I just boot normally in KDE open chromium with 10-15 tabs and start eclipse which takes about 1GB RAM and I'm already hitting the swap since I have 3GB of RAM. And no I can't buy more RAM since it's a laptop.

[duby229]

Hold on, if you know you are hitting memory limitations, why are you choosing some of the most bloated software that you can choose? PA, KDE, Cromium, Eclipse... I mean come on, in every case there is something lighter that would work better on your hardware.

EDIT: and if you are only using 1GB of ram and still have 2GB available, and it is already swapping, then something is configured wrong... You should check out swappiness.

[XorEaxEax]

So what? I still get choppy mouse movement under heavy load and can't play music continuously.

I recall having quite noticeable GUI lag when copying large files (~10gb and bigger) which prompted me to try out BFS and BFQ quite a while back and it did indeed improve gui responsiveness greatly. However as time went I stopped using a BFS patched kernel as the gui lag improved alot in mainline and these days it seldom happens (actually I can't recall when it did last).

Never had any sound playing lag when copying files though, also this gui lag has always been IO bound, I've never encountered it despite maximizing the cpu cores (like running x264 encodes while compiling etc). I wouldn't be surprised if BFS/BFQ still gave noticeably better responsiveness during extreme IO load but it's running smooth enough here for me not to bother.

For the record I haven't used swap on my machines for many years so there may be problems with excessive swap access that I'm not aware of.

[BO$$]

Hold on, if you know you are hitting memory limitations, why are you choosing some of the most bloated software that you can choose? PA, KDE, Cromium, Eclipse... I mean come on, in every case there is something lighter that would work better on your hardware.

EDIT: and if you are only using 1GB of ram and still have 2GB available, and it is already swapping, then something is configured wrong... You should check out swappiness.

I meant that only Eclipse takes about 1GB, not everything. Chromium takes a little more than 1GB and the OS plus dolphin rhythmbox takes the rest and goes over 3GB.

Eclipse is for Android development, Android is pretty much done for Eclipse IDE. What do you recommend for lower memory usage as a browser instead of Chromium? Using other DE doesn't make that much of a difference memory-wise around 100-150 MB (tested Gnome and Xfce). pulseaudio takes little memory from what I see in System Monitor around 3MB.

[Pallidus]

running linux with amd anything = that's your problem son


here I'd say overall performance is 70-80% of windows performance (I blame it worse intel drivers) but everything runs great.


fans tend to kick in a lil more than in win 2