Hm, it seemed to me seti was slowing down my weathered 486 even when niced to the hilt. Guess I was wrong. Thanks for the tip. Xscreensaver, nota bene, seems to do what I want, barring unforeseen events like compiling a kernel while having a coffee. Ah well chris
On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Joey Hess wrote: > Krzys Majewski wrote: > > I did that a few months ago, but it did not come with a screen-saver > > option. What I did now is download the xseti tarball and the > > xscreensaver package, together they do the job (although they do more > > than what I wanted, which is just to have setiathome run in the bg > > when the screen blank). Two other options I researched are: > > - a script which looks in /proc/loadavg and starts/stops setiathome > > when the 5-/1-minute load average is low/high > > - a script which looks in /proc/interrupts and starts setiathome when > > the kbd and mouse interrupt values haven't changed for a while, > > then stops it as soon as they do. > > It seems to me you don't understand how unix handles niced processes. (I > assume that setiathome defaults to running niced, like other distributed > processing clients such as the distributed.net client. Even if it > doesn't, you can renice it.) > > Processes on a unix system have scheduling priorities. If a background > process is running "niced", it typically has a nice value from 10 to 19. > Normal processes have a nice value of 0. Extremely high priority processes > have a negative nice value. You can see a processes's nice value by running > top (the NI field). > > The higher the nice value, the less likely a program is to get some cpu > time. The basic effect is that if a daemon runs niced in the background, > it will not get any cpu time, ever, unless the cpu is otherwise idle. Any > other process will preemt it. So you can run things like setiathome at all > times, without any slowdown on your machine. > > For more information, see the nice(1) and renice(8) man pages. > > -- > see shy jo >