> >Im looking into why the Xserver starts with niceness -1 when started as root. > >Ive tracked the occurance down to these lines in xinit.c > >#ifdef PRIO_PROCESS > > setpriority( PRIO_PROCESS, serverpid, -1 ); > >#endif
> >basically the setpriority() call is made whenever the Xserver is initialised. > >If this is done by a normal user niceness will become 0 as a normal user > >cannot set niceness below 0. But as root, well as you can see -1 ... > GUI responsiveness is critically important. Nothing makes a system feel > sluggish more than poor mouse response, even if everything else is > blazingly fast. Except that running the X server w/ a different priority than local clients is not a good idea... Exactly how bad idea this is depends on the scheduler (if the -1 difference in priority does not mean much then the effects won't be as visible), but you should be able to see for yourself by eg running an xterm and doing something like "ls -l" on a large directory a few times, with the xterm at 1) lower, 2) higher and 3) equal priority to the server. Last time i tried that was a quite a few years ago, faster machines could make it less noticable (SMP hides the problem too), but basically if you run the client at lower priority (eg because you set the server to -1) it will appear as if most X calls were followed by an XSync() (terminal will scroll line-by-line, apps will draw their widgets synchronously etc). I certainly wouldn't use the term "blazingly fast" to describe such a system... (running apps at higher prio has a different effect; this can really make the system feel sluggish, while visually "cleaner" - less incremental drawing, terminal scrolls page-by-page etc) I doubt the -1 difference makes things as bad as the extremes described above, but i don't believe it actually improves things, and the effects are most likely still there. artur _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
