Linux is hella predictable -- darned near real time -- if all it runs is your stack and especially if you set the process priority high enough.
Next time start with a minimal system and build up, rather than starting with a fully-loaded system and trying to isolate and remove which of over 9000 processes kicked in to plage you with that slowdown.
PROTIP: /sbin/init can be whatever the hell you want. Symlink it to /usr/bin/emacs and you have a poor man's Lisp machine.
Oh, and uhh -- turn off swap.
One of the reasons why I left Debian was that it takes a very kitchen-sink-included approach to a base system -- including, as I found out the hard way, things with unpleasant exploitable vulnerabilities. And it's hard for a person of ordinary Unix skills, not versed in Debian arcana, to pare it back to a manageable state.
Next time start with a minimal system and build up, rather than starting with a fully-loaded system and trying to isolate and remove which of over 9000 processes kicked in to plage you with that slowdown.
PROTIP: /sbin/init can be whatever the hell you want. Symlink it to /usr/bin/emacs and you have a poor man's Lisp machine.
Oh, and uhh -- turn off swap.
One of the reasons why I left Debian was that it takes a very kitchen-sink-included approach to a base system -- including, as I found out the hard way, things with unpleasant exploitable vulnerabilities. And it's hard for a person of ordinary Unix skills, not versed in Debian arcana, to pare it back to a manageable state.
I'm an Arch man to this day for this reason.