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Anticipatory Scheduler in Kernel 2.5+ Benchmarked
gmuslera points to this article at KernelTrap comparing available benchmarks for schedulers available for the 2.5 kernel, with the 2.4's scheduler as a reference poin. "In some cases, the new Anticipatory Scheduler performs several times better than the others, doing a task in a few seconds instead minutes like the others."
I'm sorry to sound like an Trolling AC, but I can't imagine why you would need 80 threads. Unless you using threads instead of a queue. I love threads, but they are and over used and hard to control and debug. The most complex thread system I've needed had ~25 threads running on 5 computers.
i wonder did anyone bother submitting this idea to the Mozilla people instead of to /. ?
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
When I first started hacking on Linux, I was working with a seasoned Linux kernel hacker who my company hired as a consultant. He helped us with some I/O issues and such, did some other tweaks and gave us a ton of inspiration to go get after it ourselves. (You be amazed at how many people are afraid to just start making changes to kernel code) He is a wickedly cool individual and as someone whose had a lot of schooling and experience it was one of the best learning experiences I can remember.
The first thing I started dorking with after that experience was the scheduler because I, like all other hakers, know how to schedule stuff. At the time, (early 2.x) the scheduler was also a fairly easy to digest piece of code that could have impacts on the system in great ways.
Well all my stuff got bit bucketed. I called up our consultant guy who my friend by now, "what's the deal? Linus doesn't like my stuff. How do you mail him stuff?" And his answer was that pretty much every body wants to tweak the scheduler, everybody sends stuff in. Linus is sage in his wisdom, schedulers are freaking hard because there is always a pedantic worst case that sucks and actually shows up in the real world. Linus has always done fairly simple things that aren't best but certainly aren't worst. So 2.0 had pretty straight round robin. 2.2 and 2.4 they started to add queuing schedulers with niceness. 2.5 we're going to get a pretty killer scheduler that has taken a ton of effort to tweak and there are still discussions to expose parameters to the user via /proc or something because you can find cases were it doesn't perform as well.
Now this IO scheduler is opening up a whole new can of worms, it's a new chunk of code called "scheduler" and all hackers know scheduling. In the past it has been fairly simple. It should be fun to watch and the kernel is going to kick mucho ass in the end. There will be a lot of talk and debate about this stuff. It's also distilled down to the trusted set that Linus will let play with things called "scheduler"