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