Gnome and task execution timing

[Brian McKee]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 6:33 PM, don fisher <hdf3 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I am running a code to locate Near Earth Objects in astronomical CCD
> images. One element of the pipeline is a package called sextractor, that
> is also available as a deb package.
>
> I am running Ubuntu 8.10.
>
> My problem is that running gdm/gnome desktop appears to cost a factor of
> two in execution time.

I wouldn't have thought gdm would even be noticed by that machine :-)

Some random thoughts in hopes of giving you an idea.  I'm not
pretending to answer anything.
What happens if you stop X entirely? (I assume it's not needed?)
What happens if you bump the priority of the process a bit?

Have you run it more than once under Gnome?  Wondering if an update,
or a passing random user was playing alien arena during your run or
something else equally unknown happened.  A screensaver that's only
configured to run under Gnome like BOINC or something?

HTH
Brian