On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 6:13 AM, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
quoted text
> > > That sounds like a non starter. What if the box is busy, what if the
>  > > daemon or something you touch needs memory and causes paging ?
>  >
>  > The daemon runs mlock'd anyway, so there won't be any need for paging
>
>  mlock does not guarantee anything of that form. A syscall by an mlocked
>  process which causes a memory allocation can cause paging of another
>  process on the system.
>
>
>  > there. As for responsiveness under heavy load, I'm not quite sure I get
>  > your meaning. On my system, at least, the only way I have managed to
>  > decrease responsiveness noticeably is to cause a lot of I/O operations
>
>  It depends a lot on hardware but you can certainly get user space delays
>  in seconds as an extreme worst case.

I don't know the details, but I believe the Linux-HA heartbeat daemons
take significant effort to eliminate unexpected delays.  See
http://www.linux-ha.org/

Lars Marowsky-Bree of Novell is extremely involved in the project and
he at least occasionally posts on LKML.  I've cc'ed him.

Greg
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