Hmm... just an idea, but why not a "screensaver mode"? > -----Original Message----- > From: Moreton, Peter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 2:42 AM > To: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list > Subject: [Prime] Possible method to get more prime-searching > participantsonline > > 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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