It will work somewhat like that...

Posted Aug 16, 2008 23:39 UTC (Sat) by strcmp (subscriber, #46006)
In reply to: It will work somewhat like that... by NAR
Parent article: Something going on with Fedora

Well, I haven't noticed better interactivity - the kernel might be better in this field, but it still takes a long time to start applications. What made a better desktop experience is the usage of multicore processors: if an application eats up 100% of CPU time, the rest of the system still works.

Starting applications looks like interactivity from a user's perspective, but for the kernel this counts as throughput: how long does it need to open all the files, read the data from disk (in the case of libraries this tend to be random reads, mainly determined by disk seek speed), parse the configuration data and setup the program. The interactivity drag talked about was scheduling threads when they are needed, i.e. no audio and video skips, fast reaction to mouse clicks.