The Linux kernel uses the CPU default scheduler, CFS, a mode that tries to be fair to all processes at the same time - both foreground and background - for high throughput. Abstractly think "they never know what you intend to do" so it's sort of middle of the road as a default - every CPU cycle of every process gets a fair tick of work unless they've been intentionally nice'd or whatnot. People who need realtime work (classic use is for audio engineers who need near-zero latency in their hardware inputs like a MIDI sequencer, but also embedded hardware uses realtime a lot) reconfigure their system(s) to that to that need; for desktop-priority users there are ways to alter the CFS scheduler to help maintain desktop responsiveness.

Have a look to Github projects such as this one to learn how and what to tweak - not that you need to necessarily use this but it's a good point to start understanding how the mojo works and what you can do even on your own with a few sysctl tweaks to get a better desktop experience while your rust code is compiling in the background. https://github.com/igo95862/cfs-zen-tweaks (in this project you're looking at the set-cfs-zen-tweaks.sh file and what it's tweaking in /proc so you can get hints on where you research goals should lead - most of these can be set with a sysctl)

There's a lot to learn about this so I hope this gets you started down the right path on searches for more information to get the exact solution/recipe which works for you.

Responsiveness for typical everyday usage is one of the main scenarios kernels like Zen/Liquorix and their out of the box scheduler configurations are meant to improve, and in my experience they help a lot. Maybe give them a go sometime!

Edit: For added context, I remember Zen significantly improving responsiveness under heavy loads such as the one OP is experiencing back when I was experimenting with some particularly computationally intensive tasks

nice +5 cargo build

nice is a program that sets priorities for the CPU scheduler. Default is 0. Goes from -19, which is max prio, to +19 which is min prio.

This way other programs will get CPU time before cargo/rustc.

The System76 scheduler helps to tune for better desktop responsiveness under high load: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler I think if you use Pop!OS this may be set up out-of-the-box.

You could try using nice to give the rust compiler less priority (higher number) for scheduling.

Lots of bad answers here. Obviously the kernel should schedule the UI to be responsive even under high load. That’s doable; just prioritise running those over batch jobs. That’s a perfectly valid demand to have on your system.

This is one of the cases where Linux shows its history as a large shared unix system and its focus as a server OS; if the desktop is just a program like any other, who’s to say it should have more priority than Rust?

I’ve also run into this problem. I never found a solution for this, but I think one of those fancy new schedulers might work, or at least is worth a shot. I’d appreciate hearing about it if it does work for you!

Hopefully in a while there are separate desktop-oriented schedulers for the desktop distros (and ideally also better OOM handlers), but that seems to be a few years away maybe.

In the short term you may have some success in adjusting the priority of Rust with nice, an incomprehensibly named tool to adjust the priority of your processes. High numbers = low priority (the task is “nicer” to the system). You run it like this: nice -n5 cargo build.

It really depends on your desktop. For instance gnome handles high CPU very well in my experience.

I would run your compiler in a podman container with a CPU cap.

Edit: it might be related to me using Fedora

"The kernel runs out of time to solve the NP-complete scheduling problem in time."

More responsiveness requires more context-switching, which then subtracts from the available total CPU bandwidth. There is a point where the task scheduler and CPUs get so overloaded that a non-RT kernel can no longer guarantee timed events.

So, web browsing is basically poison for the task scheduler under high load. Unless you reserve some CPU bandwidth (with cgroups, etc.) beforehand for the foreground task.

Since SMT threads also aren't real cores (about ~0.4 - 0.7 of an actual core), putting 16 tasks on a 16/8 machine is only going to slow down the execution of all other tasks on the shared cores. I usually leave one CPU thread for "housekeeping" if I need to do something else. If I don't, some random task is going to be very pleased by not having to share a core. That "spare" CPU thread will be running literally everything else, so it may get saturated by the kernel tasks alone.

nice +5 is more of a suggestion to "please run this task with a worse latency on a contended CPU.".

(I think I should benchmark make -j15 vs. make -j16 to see what the difference is)

I face similar issue when updating steam games although I think that's related to disk read write

But either way, issues like these gonna need to be address before we finally hit the year of Linux desktop lol

Sounds like Kubuntu's fault to me. If they provide the desktop environment, shouldn't they be the ones making it play nice with the Linux scheduler? Linux is configurable enough to support real-time scheduling.

FWIW I run NixOS and I've never experienced lag while compiling Rust code.

If you compile on windows server the same problem happens. The server is basically gone. So there seems to be some special scheduler configuration in windows client os.

So I just tried using nice -n +19 and it still lags my browser and my UI. So that's not even a good workaround.

Found this b for your problem of limiting one specific program such as rust compiler: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1367612/how-can-i-limit-the-cpu-and-ram-usage-for-a-process

Firefox on my raspberry pi grinds the thing to a halt, so I created a shortcut:

systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M -p CPUQuota=50% firefox-esr

You say it doesn't top out on memory, so you don't need the -p MemoryLimit=500M parameter. Set your compiler CPUQuota to maybe 80%, or whatever you can work out with trial and error.

All the comments here are great. One other suggestion I didn't see: use chrt to start the build process with the sched_batch policy. It's lower than sched_other, which most processes will be in, so the compilation processes should be bumped off the CPU for virtually everyone else

This hasn't been my experience when no swapping is involved (not a concern for me anymore with 32GiB physical RAM with 28GiB zram).

And I've been Rusting since v1.0, and Linuxing for even longer.

And my setup is boring (and stable), using Arch's LTS kernel which is built with CONFIG_HZ=300. Long gone are the days of running linux-ck.

Although I do use craneleft backend now day to day, so compiles don't take too long anyway.

Linux defaults are optimized for performance and not for desktop usability.