Normally I do not care much about desktop – performance, since my servers do not run any gui. But at home I run some older hardware (Pentium) which gets sometimes very sluggish (mouse-movements in KDE). I observe that this is the case where there is some disk-io background activity going on.
How can I set that disk-priority lower, so that my gui gets more attention?
I already tried to set the disk-scheduler for my sata-drive from cfq to as – but that did not help.
I remember that I had – long time ago – a similar problem on OpenSuSE – there I set a different general scheduler tick-rate (shorter as default, as far as I remember). But I do not remember what that was exactly, neither how to set that on my current Linux (CentOS 5, 32-Bit).
Any hints are welcome.
Best Answer
Do you have a kernel >= 2.6.38? If not, you may want to upgrade your kernel, so it includes "The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders". This patch drastically increases the responsiveness of the Linux desktop. Since this patch was introduced, the only time my desktop was slow was when it was swapping, as Mikko Rantalainen pointed out, even with recent versions of X.