Drat, sent my reply to Dennis only (again... :-/); resending to the
whole list.
On 3/10/21 5:31 PM, dmccunney wrote:
I can't agree. We are not in the single-user, single tasking DOS days
when one thing was going on at a time. At any moment, there are a
number of things going on in a current consumer computer. Some of them
will be OS routines, and some will be programs. Users may well start
a program that will take time to do what it does (like compile code to
create an executable,) push it into the background, and do other
things in the foreground.
Yes, but the point is that the user tends to have trouble finding enough
for the machine to do.
There may be an audio program so they can
listen to music while they do things like work on code in an editor,
or review documentation, and a download manager or a torrent client
uploading/downloading in the background.
While writing this e-mail with Rhythmbox playing in the background, my
system load average has remained below 1, with significant amounts of
time below 0.4. On a four-core machine, that means any given core is
only spending 10%-25% of its time with a process scheduled.
The human is the slowest component in the chain, but waiting for the
human is *not* the only thing that machine will be doing.
Not the only thing, but still the primary thing.
I have occasionally started long running processes and gone to bed,
assuming they would be domn in the morning. I'm out of the loop, but
the machine is not in a wait state. It's still doing work.
As have I. But most of the time I don't have such things for it to do.
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