Idea #6567: Always leave enough resources to keep mouse and keyboard running smoothly

290

Written by steve196 the 7 Apr 08 at 09:19. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

Often a process takes up so many resources, that it blocks input from the keyboard or mouse, or slows them to a crawl, so that i cannot even react to or stop the process.
I think, a certain amount of resources for keyboard and mouse should always be reserved, so that at least the system itself (for all apps this would be too much work) can nearly instantly ( less than 2 seconds, update mouse pointer at least every half a second) react to them. I think the cost in resources for this would be very tiny, since even very old computers had a smoothly running keyboard and mouse.

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shlomil wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 13:24

Maybe the new CFS will take care of it.
The CFS is designed to avoid process starvation and is included an on by default in the next Ubuntu release.

Eldmannen wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 14:06

Yeah, this is very important.
I really hate when the computer is all frozen and not even the keyboard or mouse works, and I stand there all helpless and powerless and cannot do anything.

eapache wrote on the 7 Apr 08 at 23:51

Yes indeed. This can be solved fairly simply by giving X a higher priority (I believe this translates to a lower Nice value for some reason).

adrian2 wrote on the 8 Apr 08 at 06:32

i don't know if it's such a good ideea, i'd rather leave the cpu take care of stuff and than let me do my clicks! Especially if there's a situation where i could loose data, or in the event of a non responding app!

Ralf.Nieuwenhuijsen wrote on the 8 Apr 08 at 09:04

It's not the CPU. It's file IO that is blocking.
And no, that is not fixed in Hardy.

It's not easy to fix either. For example: you can renice-io all file-operations (make them slower, so they don't trash the system so much), but then applications will 'hang' until their swap page is brought back from memory.

In other words, we will need per-usage settings of file-io-nice.

Some file-io should block the system, because you are really _waiting_ for it. Like loading the firefox libraries when launching firefox.

Other file-io should behave much 'nicer', because you are likely doing other things while waiting for it to finish. Like when you install new software, or compress a large directory.

There is a lot to gain in intelligent scheduling of resources, but the problem is that the operating system currently can't 'automagically' distinguin between io-operations that should and operations that should not block the system.

gmatht wrote on the 10 Apr 08 at 14:25

Another cause is a process that just allocates ever more and more memory. IMHO, most processes should be ulimit'ed to between 50% and 100% of physical RAM.

Bender2k14 wrote on the 28 Jul 08 at 05:38

@eapache

If my Nice value is 0, then that means I am 100% mean. I think that makes sense.

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