[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rick B wrote:

>    Yes, the background processes are what bother me most, as they can 
> start at any given time. I don't know if anyone else has noticed 
> random slowdowns in their framerates for a couple of seconds here and 
> there but I have. They are not dramatic drops in fps but they still 
> exist. The thing is, I don't know what causes these slowdowns, and 
> honestly, I don't know how to find out. I haven't been playing in the 
> failsafe terminal long enough to know if these random slowdowns occur 
> there like they do in Gnome. Awhile back it used to be real bad, every 
> couple of hours my framerate would drop to 18 fps and stay there for 
> about 15 seconds, and I didn't know what was causing my machine to do 
> that. I accidently fixed that problem when I added "acpi=off" to the 
> kernel boot arguments. I added that so I could have more control over 
> how my IRQs are set, as I wan't my video card on IRQ 10 so it will get 
> first dibbs on CPU time, but it also solved my sporadic fps drop.
>
>                     Rick B
>
>
I have to be _very_ careful with the updatedb deamon, I know it is  
programmed to execute every night at 4 am, but if you don't give it time 
to execute, it'll execute the next time the machine is on, I haven't 
seen this process come up when playin UT2004 (thankfully) but it does 
happen in other games (like NWN), when that process runs, it literally 
kills performance. So my recomendation would be to make sure you execute 
that process when you are away from your computer or at a convenient time).