User process starvation under heavy network traffic in FreeBSD 5.3

[bg at sics.se (Björn Grönvall)]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 17:43:16 -0800
"Youlin Feng" <yfeng_(_at_)_verniernetworks_(_dot_)_com> wrote:

> We are building a network appliance running FreeBSD 5.3 and under very
> heavy network traffic the user processes don't get scheduled for an
> unacceptable period of time.

Did you try polling(4)? It does not affect scheduling the way you
would like it to happen but it often it frees enough of the CPU
resources to make the problem go away. Your milage may wary though.

Cheers,
Bj?rn

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