Hello all,
It just dawned on me why US WEST kept saying that the priority of NTPRIME I
was running was not at idle but at normal priority. If you don't recall, it
says:
"Carmer later discovered that Blosser had programmed US WEST computers to
give his search for a Mersenne prime number standard priority. Blosser,
however, claimed that he gave the NT Prime program less than standard
priority. According to Carmer a computer programmed to give standard
priority can use up to 90 percent of the computers capacity if no other
program is running."
Well, I always thought that was a curious statement. The prime.ini file
attached to the warrant showed that there were no modifications to the
priority= line, so it would have used the default priority of 1.
Well, it occurred to me today why US WEST was so mistaken...
I happened to be viewing a list of processes on my NT machine today (using
the fabulous PSLIST from www.sysinternals.com) and noticed that NTPRIME.EXE
shows a priority of 8 (normal), but has 2 threads.
I further did a 'pslist -x ntprime' and it shows that there is one thread
running at priority 9, which I would assume is the "management" thread
(writing save files, etc), but there is another thread running at priority 1
which is actually the thread using all the CPU time (as indicated by the
"user time" column).
Would it be at all useful to have the program launch itself as priority 1,
and then elevate the priority of the "management" thread to 9 afterwards, so
that a cursory examination like the one done by the buffoons at US WEST
would be more indicative of the real priority of the program?
Also, it's been made abundantly clear through my conversations with US WEST,
the FBI, and the US Atty. that they have zero clues whatsoever about what an
idle priority thread is. They would say "well, the CPU time was maxed out"
and to them, that meant that the program was a CPU hog...I tried to explain
it to them, but they didn't grasp it.
For what it's worth, they don't seem to be able to prove that the network
problems they had that day were due to NTPRIME at all, and, in fact, reports
that US WEST graciously provided showed that they had the same exact
problems many times on many different occasions. I always knew that,
because curiously enough, the day they give as the day they noticed problems
was actually about 4 days before I even installed the software onto the US
WEST computers. How funny is that? :-)
Moral of the story, US WEST bad... NTPRIME good. :-)
I just wanted to pass that along and get some feedback on whether a more
"user-friendly" priority listing of the main ntprime process would be a good
idea, for just such situations.
And also, for any who had doubts about the friendliness of NTPRIME after
reading the FBI's misinformation in my case, rest assured, NTPRIME doesn't
gobble up resources unless you specifically set the priority of the
number-crunching thread (throught the prime.ini file) to something higher
than 1.
Party on, fellow GIMPS'ters.
Aaron
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