Comment 35 for bug 30557

Well, my problem goes away if I change my config from CONFIG_HZ_250 to CONFIG_HZ_1000. The change from 1000 to 250 was done in 2.5.15-24, which corresponds nicely to when I started to see problems with sluggish performance.

  * i386/amd64: Change HZ=1000 to HZ=250. The high frequency was causing high
    power consumption on some laptops, and also some latency under certain I/O
    loads.

Even when I rebuild with CONFIG_HZ_1000, the idle time in /proc/stat continues to go up very slowly. Seems more and more likely we're talking about different problems.

Nonetheless, I'd much prefer it if the ubuntu 686 kernel didn't hose X performance on my laptop. I doubt regressing the "HZ=250" change would count as progress, but if anyone has suggestions for further research into why HZ=250 causes problems on my machine, I'd be interested in hearing them.

I'd also be interested whether anybody else reporting issues sees a change when HZ is set to 1000 instead of 250.