On Sat, 2003-07-12 at 12:16, Daniel Robbins wrote: > On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 06:30:38PM +0100, Stroller wrote: > > > To compare performance, you should use similarly configured kernels. > > > Preempt decreases overall performance significantly but also increases > > > interactivity greatly. Things will benchmark slower with it enabled, > > > like you are experiencing. > > > > I'm sorry - this is really dumb of me to ask: what is "increased > > interactivity" in this context..? > > Lower latency with audio applications, smoother response in X, general > elimination of any "jerkiness" when the system is under heavy load. > Generally gives a much better experience when using Gentoo as a desktop > environment, or for multimedia apps. You may get slightly lower framerates > in games, but the game will be consistently smooth and you won't have audio > dropouts even under high load. > > Best Regards,
Daniel, One sort of urban legend that's out there in the Linux audio community has to do with the value of a dual vs. single processor systems and how much they can help in this area. The argument seems to go that on a DP machine one processor will handle the GUI/OS/drivers and the second processor will handle the audio application. However, no one (that I know of anyway) has really measured this quantitatively and shown it to be true. (It might be to subjective anyway...) Any thoughts? My concern has generally been that every SMP machine I've looked at (admittedly not that many) seems to be a generation behind in chipsets and memory technology which goes against the goal. If I agree to pay more money for a second processor I'd at least like the rest of the machine to be equivalent technology. I've never used a Linux SMP machine, so I have no idea how one tells the system to run a certain app on a certain processor, but I can see it should be possible I suppose. Thanks for any thoughts you might have. Cheers, Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
