High CPU - kjournald & kblockd - nice level

[Jim Cornette]

Brian Hanks wrote:

>Has anyone else experienced what I will call sporadic, jerky X response
>in FC2?  It seems that any time I have a background process running that
>is even remotely utilizing any CPU or IO, I have pathetic response in
>X.  
>
>My RH9 box and my FC1 box don't have this issue and they are slower
>machines with less memory and older disk.  As a test to rule out CPU or
>chipset specific issues, I've built a completely different machine with
>FC2.  Both machines exhibited the exact same behavior. 
>
>I quite reluctant to make the switch to FC2 without solving this issue. 
>It's quite annoying to have X become unstable every time I go to compile
>something in the background.  
>
>Hardware Setup #1:
>Asus A7V600 (VIA Chipset)
>1 GB RAM
>Athlon XP 3000+
>2 Samsung 120 GB SATA drives (RAID1 with LVM2)
>NVIDIA MX440
>FC2 fully updated
>
>Hardware Setup #2:
>Asus A7N266-VM (NVidia Chipset)
>1 GB RAM
>Athlon XP 2100+
>2 Maxtor 40 GB ATA drives (RAID1 with LVM2)
>NVIDIA MX400
>FC2 fully updated
>
>Upon further digging, it looks like kblockd & kjournald
>are chewing up a ton of CPU.  I'm even noticing it when I don't have
>large processes running.  It's definitely not as severe, but it seems to
>be occurring quite regularly. 
>
>The one test that I haven't done is to remove LVM2 and RAID1 from the
>picture.  I wonder if that would eliminate the problem?
>
>What exactly is the function of kblockd and kjournald?  Any insight
>would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks,
>Brian Hanks
>bhanks at bhanks.com
>
>  
>
I'm not doing a lot of compiling on my computer. I recall something 
about the scheduler having priority levels that can be assigned to have 
processes use a lower or higher priority level.
 
I just tried to run
man nice
and it came up with an explanation.

My question about the completion of the compilation. Is the speed of the 
compilation quicker?

Jim