On Apr 22, 2012, at 3:39 PM, geraldcornish wrote:
Current setup is Pismo 500MHz/1GB Ram/100GB HDD Tiger 10.4.11 & OS 9.2.2
Intention is to upgrade to Dual G4/G5 but keeping Tiger/Classic.
My better half needs to use Pagemaker in classic while using OSX
simultaneously. Pagemaker uses up all the spare cpu cycles and
slows down all other programs, and I assume this would still be the
case with a faster Mac.
Depends on how PageMaker is written. If it's polling for user input
continuously, then it will certainly always (try to) use some cpu
time, not a lot %-wise if you have lots to spare.
Seems odd to me that PageMaker would be continuously piggy. Have you
watched the system with Activity Monitor, to see what resources are
actually in such low demand that the whole system runs slowly?
> if we move to a dual G4/G5 how does Tiger handle the two cpus?
OS X (and OS 9) supports multiple processors (discrete, multi core,
threads) two ways. First: when a process or thread is ready for cpu
time, it is dispatched to one of the CPU/cores. Second: if the
application knows how to use non-sequential threads, then the threads
are dispatched the same way - to whichever CPU/core has time
available.
Will it assign classic/pagemaker to one cpu only, leaving the other
cpu to do any OSX work needed?
No. Under OS X, scheduling is done preemptively, as resources are
available. That means a process is given a quantum time slice on a
CPU/core, and the CPU is taken away when the slice ends or when the
process becomes otherwise blocked (waiting for i/o, etc). Classic is
a process under OS X... so when its slice ends, the app running
within Classic is suspended. When the next slice is available to
that process, it is re-assigned to a CPU/core... Of course, if the
process is still "loaded" in one particular CPU/core, then assignment
preference is given to using that particular CPU/core.
This would be ideal for us if one cpu is kept free of the Pagemaker loading.
You need to think of the OS being the high muckety, not the CPU. The
CPU, like memory, is *just* a resource that the OS controls / manages.
See John's reply wrt machine choice and bootability.
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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