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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

No offense to the maintainers of the 'performance' and 'gaming' kernels, but they're usually not that well maintained. TBF, I haven't tried ALL of them, but a lot of the popular ones. They usually configure 'odd' defaults that risk stability (in the 'staying up' sense, as well as data integrity sense).

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Same. I tried some, and even in games they didn't provide much of an improvement. Sometimes performing worse, even.

I just put some niceties like irqbalance and add a few lines to sysctl.conf for better latency at a cost of throughput (doesn't matter if you're just using the system as a desktop and not as a server). And that gives me a very nice experience overall.

Edit: Please, be careful. This is under a very well performing machine, take a look at replies for more information.

How do you improve the latency? Especially reacting to mouse and keyboard, I have an old PC which could use that.

By decreasing latency, you decrease throughput. Thus if you have a slow and old computer, you could end up dropping inputs entirely by decreasing latency, or make it feel sluggish/laggy due to it processing a queue.

You're correct, I should add something to my post.

For older devices, the most gain would probably come from using a lower resolution input and a lower resolution output (to match what was available at the time). Throwing a 2k monitor on a graphics card from 2014 is probably going to be a barely passable experience (buffers weren't as big back then), same with mice.

Oh, I was mostly describing network latency and file IO cough should apply to mouse polling as well but bear in mind what another user has said. For mouse specific concerns, I would take a look at the following tutorial:

https://www.quakeworld.nu/wiki/Smooth_Quake_in_Linux

Best of luck!

Thanks! Curious, why changing network/disk IO latency, does it help in online games noticeably?

It does, even when navigating the web.

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