Will "nice"d background tasks interfere (slow down) normal foreground
task? I used to amaze my Windoze-using friends by burning CD/DVDs while
carrying out my normal work. I normally point to the "top" output,
which says something like "Tasks: 133 total", and say to my astonished
friend, "I can burn my CD/DVDs while there are over a hundred task running
at the same time" -- just enjoy looking at their
astonished faces. However, there is one thing that really make me
question how Linux schedule its tasks.

There is this special case, which will let me make coasters every time
-- when nget is updating it headers. I'm using a not-so-monster news
server, which can't compete with supper-monster news server like
giganews, etc. However, whenever nget updates it headers, my computer is
brought down to its knees. I run my nget with "nice -n 12", and my growisofs
(for DVD burning) with "nice -n -2", even so I make coasters from time
to time.

I think it must related with kswapd0 -- the kernel page fault swap
daemon. Shouldn't page faults caused by "nice -n 12" tasks have much lower
priorities then that from "nice -n -2"? I think it should, but why I
make coasters from time to time then?

My box's memory is 768M. I don't think it is too small.

tong

PS.