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From: PAT@rcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu (Patrick Plaisted)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: PPC, IAC, and True Multitasking (tm)
Message-ID: <5602@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 90 17:14:09 GMT
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|
|  >If anything, a preemptive operating system will be faster, because it will
|  >perform task switching only when necessary.
|
|  Apparently you have never used a Sun. There have been countless times that
|  I have pushed ye olde mouse button and waited for *seconds* for the
|  wonderful preemptive OS to respond to the input. And I'm not the only
|  one making this complaint.
|

Even having never seen your hardware setup, I'd bet the mouse delays you're
seeing are due to paging and having nothing to do with pre-emptive scheduling.
If you're trying to run X11R4, emacs, and a couple of xterm windows on anything
less than 8 megs of memory then you're waiting on things to be brought back off
of disk, not the scheduler playing games with you.

If on the other hand you have plenty of memory but you're compiling the latest
versions of nethack and conquer in the backround while trying to work
interactavely then it's more understandable.  You can hardly blame the
scheduler for doing it's job and giving those backround jobs equal footing for
cputime.  If you want faster response in the foreground, lower the priorities of
the jobs in the backround.

Even if it does slow things down some on the Sun try starting up a kermit
download, fire up your C compiler on a big program, and then try to puruse a
file in msword on your Mac.  It ain't gonna happen.  It's very hard to write
complicated software programs that have to bend over backwards in order to
please cooperative multi-tasking so that foreground jobs feel responsive.  VERY
HARD...

|  Cheers,
|      -Ken K
|  --
|  Ken Konecki
|  "Eat well, stay fit, and die anyway"
|  e-mail:kenk@tellabs.com    -or-    ...!uunet!tellab5!kenk
|  U.S. Mail: 1271 Portchester Circle, Carol Stream, IL 60188

===========================================================================
Patrick Plaisted                     |pat@agvax2.ag.ohio-state.edu
System Programmer                    |  or if you want to
Ohio Cooperative Extension Service   |  torture me with unix:
The Ohio State University            |pat@klingon.eng.ohio-state.edu
2120 Fyffe Rd. Room #109             |
Columbus, Ohio 43210                 |     (614) 292-4338
===========================================================================
I'm not quite sure who's ideas these are;  I think they're mine...