Interactivity, what is it?

There has been a lot of talk about what makes up a nice feeling desktop under
linux. It comes down to two different but intimately related parameters which
are not well defined. We often use the terms responsiveness and interactivity
in the same sentence, but I'd like to separate the two. As there is no formal
definition I prefer to define them as such:

Responsiveness: The rate at which your workloads can proceed under different
	load conditions.

Interactivity: The scheduling latency and jitter present in tasks where the user
	would notice a palpable deterioration under different load conditions.

Responsiveness would allow you to continue using your machine without too much
interruption to your work, whereas interactivity would allow you to play audio
or video without any dropouts, or drag a gui window across the screen and have
it render smoothly across the screen without jerks .

Contest was a benchmark originally written by me to test system responsiveness,
and interbench is a benchmark I wrote as a sequel to contest to test
interactivity.

Con Kolivas
Mon Jul 11 17:29:21 2005