well, running heavy multiprocess pipes (netpbm, imagemagick, tesseract, TeX) in the background does not slow down the graphic apps, mainly emacs, firefox, gimp,

well, running heavy multiprocess pipes (netpbm, imagemagick, tesseract, TeX) in the background does not slow down the graphic apps, mainly emacs, firefox, gimp, feh, etc. Even watching a video with mplayer is mostly without any freezing. Distro is Gentoo as cleaned and lean as possibe. And this on 10 years old Opteron PCs.