1*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino Interactivity, what is it? 2*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 3*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoThere has been a lot of talk about what makes up a nice feeling desktop under 4*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinolinux. It comes down to two different but intimately related parameters which 5*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinoare not well defined. We often use the terms responsiveness and interactivity 6*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinoin the same sentence, but I'd like to separate the two. As there is no formal 7*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinodefinition I prefer to define them as such: 8*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 9*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoResponsiveness: The rate at which your workloads can proceed under different 10*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino load conditions. 11*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 12*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoInteractivity: The scheduling latency and jitter present in tasks where the user 13*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino would notice a palpable deterioration under different load conditions. 14*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 15*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoResponsiveness would allow you to continue using your machine without too much 16*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinointerruption to your work, whereas interactivity would allow you to play audio 17*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinoor video without any dropouts, or drag a gui window across the screen and have 18*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinoit render smoothly across the screen without jerks . 19*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 20*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoContest was a benchmark originally written by me to test system responsiveness, 21*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinoand interbench is a benchmark I wrote as a sequel to contest to test 22*86d7f5d3SJohn Marinointeractivity. 23*86d7f5d3SJohn Marino 24*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoCon Kolivas 25*86d7f5d3SJohn MarinoMon Jul 11 17:29:21 2005 26