On Friday 27 October 2006 17:30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > There are two main causes that could lead to Prime95 slowing up a machine. > > - The first cause is memory size, ... > > - The second cause that could bring a machine to become very slow because > of Prime95 running, is thermal throttling.
These are major and important effects. There is another cause - due to the design and implementation of the operating system's process scheduler. This differs between operating systems but basically the problem is the same. When a process switch occurs, the process being switched to suffers for a period because data which was present in processor registers, memory caches, instruction pipelines etc. has to be rebuilt. Nothing about the process being switched from (low memory profile, low priority, ...) can help in any way. Consequently _any_ background process using significant CPU resources is bound to impact on the responsivity of the system to some extent. Fortunately prime95/mprime has a mechanism to prevent it from contending seriously for CPU resources whenever specified named executable images are loaded. However even this mechanism requires occasionally scheduling itself to execute in order to check if the "offending" foreground process is still in existence! Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
