[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Rick B]

Rick B wrote:

> 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
>
>
    I was looking at my cron files and there are cron jobs that get run 
hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. The hourly job is "diskcheck" that 
checks for free disk space. I'm sure everyone would agree that it 
wouldn't be a good idea if that was to run in the middle of a game. I 
wonder if the patches that Kolivas is putting out have a way to deal 
with this problem? Guess I need to do some reading.

                Rick B