I'd like to preface this email with "IMHO" :-)
Lot's of folk I have talked with about Prime95 have installed P95 on their
desktop, and then de-installed it due to the performance impact it had on the
machine as a whole. Even though the P95 process runs at a low scheduler
priority, it still uses 100% of the available CPU (obviously!), and can leave
XP 'gasping for breath'. Basically, the XP scheduler is not that clever at
maintaining responsiveness of forground apps when low priority tasks exist that
are compute-bound.
I was wondering if George W might consider including some extra logic in the
next version of P95 to cause it to 'back-off' the CPU under some circumstances.
One might define a configuration flag to turn on this feature, say 'niceflag'
meaning 'be nice to the other processes'.
Various approaches could be used and I'll propose just one:
if (keyboard OR mouse activity) AND (niceflag=true)
{
sleep 100msec // Let the forground app have
unhindered access to the CPU for 1/10th sec
}
(OpenVMS hackers will remember a similar feature of the scheduler called
"priority boosting" which occured when a task completed a terminal I/O. This
feature maintained responsiveness to user applications when the CPU was
saturated)
regards, peter moreton
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