I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.
Did not see “faster than Commodore 64!” coming!
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.
Also, the times rats got into the networking room and ate random cables. I should add the network was built by volunteer students in the ‘90s.