I get these little lag spikes that only last a few ms while playing stepmania. Its very annoying. Stepmania is normally getting 1600-5000 FPS depending while playing stepmania/menu’s so it usually runs super good but just these micro lags that piss me off.
I tried disabling intel turbo (incase that was causing it) but one thing I have noticed is my machine seems like it has a huge number of interrupts/sec gaming or not. I don’t think ive ever seen it under 30k interrupts/sec even when idle. Here is while I am playing the game:
04:01:40 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
04:01:50 PM all 3.07 0.00 0.15 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.76 32366.93
04:02:00 PM all 3.77 0.00 0.12 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.10 32445.20
04:02:10 PM all 3.12 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.76 32452.90
04:02:20 PM all 3.12 0.00 0.10 0.03 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.74 32418.30
04:02:30 PM all 3.13 0.00 0.09 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.76 32456.40
04:02:40 PM all 3.26 0.00 0.11 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.61 32412.80
04:02:50 PM all 3.13 0.00 0.09 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.76 32368.50
04:03:00 PM all 3.21 0.00 0.12 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.65 32528.50
04:03:10 PM all 3.14 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.74 32388.81
04:03:20 PM all 3.13 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.74 32428.40
04:03:30 PM all 3.12 0.00 0.12 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.74 32425.90
04:03:40 PM all 3.29 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.59 32422.30
04:03:50 PM all 3.13 0.00 0.11 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.73 32393.00
04:04:00 PM all 3.16 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 96.72 32449.10
04:04:10 PM all 3.12 0.00 0.09 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.77 32426.40
04:04:20 PM all 3.78 0.00 0.13 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 96.05 32481.40
Here is idle:
04:20:44 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
04:20:54 PM all 0.47 0.00 0.12 0.03 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.38 32924.40
04:21:04 PM all 0.28 0.00 0.11 0.03 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.57 32531.50
04:21:14 PM all 0.45 0.00 0.12 0.03 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.39 32887.90
04:21:24 PM all 0.33 0.00 0.09 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.55 32500.00
04:21:34 PM all 0.29 0.00 0.11 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.58 32525.20
04:21:44 PM all 0.50 0.00 0.14 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.33 32975.70
04:21:54 PM all 0.42 0.00 0.10 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.46 32647.80
04:22:04 PM all 0.41 0.00 0.14 0.03 0.00 0.01 0.00 99.41 32808.10
Anyone have any ideas? I have also tried forcing the videocard to use max performance as well to no avail.
As you can see not a huge difference in interrupts here… It also seems really high. Here is my workstation machine using an identically configured kernel running a significantly heavier xorg configuration (4 monitors with xgl) and its interrupts are way lower:
I was thinking maybe the massive amount of interrupts is what is causing the lag… maybe not though. Does anyone have any suggestions?