> > I've had similar problems with a few other multimedia sorts of > > junkware. Near as I can tell, some of these things put their video or > > animation thread at Idle_Priority+1 or something, and it gets eaten > > alive by Prime95. > > Isn't it the old problem - no matter what priority a process is > running at, unless it's interrupt driven it won't preempt a process > running at a lower priority. ...
process and thread dispatching in MS Windows IS interrupt driven. Anything that causes a thread or process thats waiting to become ready will cause it to immediately dispatch if its the highest priority ready process, the system doesn't wait for the next major quantum tick. Multimedia stuff is either waiting on sound buffer events, or multimedia timer events (which have 1mS resolution) or disk IO buffer events, or software semaphore events, all of which are interrupt driven and will cause an immediate dispatch. near as I can guess, the issue here is that Prime95 is running a few priority notches above idle and when another process tries to run at a lower priority it will stall behind prime95. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
