[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Rick B]

Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:

> 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).
>
     Yeah, mine does the same thing and always at 4am. There must be 
some way to do all the cron jobs manually.

                Rick B