Urs Holzer <urs### [at] andonyarcom> wrote:
> jhu wrote:
> > with compiler options (and possibly installing a new OS)! All on an
> > AMD Phenom II x6 1090T @ stock (3.2 GHz). Still plan on installing
> > FreeBSD on this computer eventually just for Povray speed
> > improvements...
>
> Did you read up on the schedulers on these various operating systems?
> They can often be configured to your needs in case the OS doesn't choose
> the best scheduling parameters itself. On Linux, you find documentation
> about the scheduler in the documentation of your kernel. The tool
> "schedtool" is useful and in its manpage, it is noted:
>
> "SCHED_BATCH  [ since 2.6.16 in mainline ] SCHED_BATCH was designed for
> non-interactive, CPU-bound applications.  It uses longer timeslices (to
> better exploit the cache), but can be interrupted anytime by other
> processes in other classes to guaratee interac‐tion of the system.
> Processes in this class are selected last but may result in a
> considerable speed-up (up to 300%). No interactive boosting is done."
>
> (On Debian, you will find schedtool in the packages with the same name.
> As far as I know you can also set the scheduler parameters via /proc)
>
> So if povray is already running you could do something like
> schedtool -3 `pidof povray`
> or to start povray using SCHED_BATCH:
> schedtool -3 -e povray
>
> In theory, this should speed up things if your running other processes
> besides POVRay.
>
> Greetings
> Urs

I wasn't aware of that, although my computer is running headless. All other
processes are at idle.

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