[gentoo-user] gigabyte mobo latency

[James]

Hello,


OK, so I run a minimalist DE (LXDE) and htop to monitor
system performance. The mobo has an fx8350 with 8 cores
(currently set at 4GHz (unclocked). The system rarily
uses over 8/32 gig of it's ram. So the resources are not
even close to exhausted. cpus mostly idle.

I do keep (2) browsers up, with tabs aplenty, but they are not being used
very much. It's mostly a myriad of documents to read while I hack at code.

Often the latency is minimal and the system response (as guaged)
from the keyboard is fine (quick). Other times the active terminal
session is a pig mostly in the web browser windows.

So. Is there a make.conf setting or elsewhere to make the 
terminal session response times, in the browsers (seamonkey, firefox)
faster?  Something like a ram_disk just for the browsers?

Note, after I finish up a project, many (browser) terminal sessions
are deleted and things are fine again. I'm just asking for a way
to ensure more ram/cpu resources are dedicated to the browsers
to boost performance, on a dynamic basis (without manual intervention).

Maybe a ram_disk_cache  (dynamic renice to-10 for the active window?) just
for the active browser window (the browser window I'm typing in? (background
code compilations are not concurrent with
the typing latency in the browser windows).....

ideas?


James