On 4 Oct 99, at 14:38, Lars Lindley wrote:
> > for the most part. However, for about 2000 to 3000 iterations,
> > it will increase. Sometimes it only goes to .214 or .256, but
> > I've seen it as high as .544. What's going on? It must be
>
> It might be some scheduled service working.
> How often is it happening or was it a one-time observation?
If you're running Win 98, look at the built-in scheduler. (You
_might_ see its tiny icon in the box at the RH end of the taskbar, in
the same area usually occupied by the clock, but you might need to
get at it through the applet in Control Panel). Maybe the scheduler
is doing something like running a defragger, which can take a while.
Disable anything which _you_ haven't specifically put there for a
purpose.
Another thing to watch out for - _all_ versions of Windows - if you
have MS Office installed, it likes to install a useless doodah called
"FindFast" & schedules it to run at ridiculously short intervals -
this darned contraption does nothing except scour the system for
Office documents, building extensive indices of them - get rid of it
(Control Panel again). I believe some Corel applications like to pull
a similar useless stunt; maybe others do, too.
MS FindFast can be disabled using its applet in the Control Panel. If
you ever need the indices, build them manually, but only when you
need them 8-)
Another thing - if you're running old DOS applications in a "DOS
box", remember that many of them continuously poll the keyboard for
input when "idle" rather than returning control to the task
scheduler. One application doing this can stall (or at least slow
down dramatically) Prime95, which deliberately runs at low priority.
Printing can have a similar effect, parallel printer ports require
very frequent CPU intervention (at medium to high priority), this
keeps the task scheduler very active & reduces the opportunites that
a "soak" program like Prime95 has of getting CPU cycles.
Also look at your power saving settings. If you have configured your
system to "snooze when idle" then maybe the CPU is going to a low-
power, low-speed mode if you don't keep tweaking something (keyboard,
mouse or possibly hard disk activity). You probably don't want the
CPU to be "snoozing" whilst Prime95 is running! Try disabling all the
power saving options except screen blanking, which is harmless - in
fact, it's wise (from several points of view) to have your monitor in
standby mode, or physically switched off, except when you actually
need to look at it.
If you have a permanent network connection - especially one using an
ancient network interface card - then the system may also be slowed
down by traffic on the network - especially broadcast storms. Or,
just possibly, someone else is tapping CPU cycles from you using an
RPC type protocol. If you can't trace any other cause, try
disconnecting the network cable from the NIC and see if the problem
"goes away". If it does, then you may be in for an interesting
session with a protocol analyser (aka "packet grabber").
Regards
Brian Beesley
_________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
