186d7f5d3SJohn Marino Interactivity, what is it? 286d7f5d3SJohn Marino 386d7f5d3SJohn MarinoThere has been a lot of talk about what makes up a nice feeling desktop under 486d7f5d3SJohn Marinolinux. It comes down to two different but intimately related parameters which 586d7f5d3SJohn Marinoare not well defined. We often use the terms responsiveness and interactivity 686d7f5d3SJohn Marinoin the same sentence, but I'd like to separate the two. As there is no formal 786d7f5d3SJohn Marinodefinition I prefer to define them as such: 886d7f5d3SJohn Marino 986d7f5d3SJohn MarinoResponsiveness: The rate at which your workloads can proceed under different 1086d7f5d3SJohn Marino load conditions. 1186d7f5d3SJohn Marino 1286d7f5d3SJohn MarinoInteractivity: The scheduling latency and jitter present in tasks where the user 1386d7f5d3SJohn Marino would notice a palpable deterioration under different load conditions. 1486d7f5d3SJohn Marino 1586d7f5d3SJohn MarinoResponsiveness would allow you to continue using your machine without too much 1686d7f5d3SJohn Marinointerruption to your work, whereas interactivity would allow you to play audio 1786d7f5d3SJohn Marinoor video without any dropouts, or drag a gui window across the screen and have 1886d7f5d3SJohn Marinoit render smoothly across the screen without jerks . 1986d7f5d3SJohn Marino 2086d7f5d3SJohn MarinoContest was a benchmark originally written by me to test system responsiveness, 2186d7f5d3SJohn Marinoand interbench is a benchmark I wrote as a sequel to contest to test 2286d7f5d3SJohn Marinointeractivity. 2386d7f5d3SJohn Marino 2486d7f5d3SJohn MarinoCon Kolivas 2586d7f5d3SJohn MarinoMon Jul 11 17:29:21 2005 26