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From: rap@dana.UUCP (Rob Peck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac Multitasking? Hee-hee!
Message-ID: <211@dana.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 12:32:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: dana.211
Posted: Mon Aug 24 12:32:45 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Aug-87 00:57:17 EDT
References: <20164@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1373@killer.UUCP>
Organization: Dana Computer, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 38
Summary: It happens...
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:7747 comp.sys.mac:5965

In article <1373@killer.UUCP>, elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) writes:
> 
> The only time I've ever seen an Amiga sluggish was when I had 30-40 "dotty
> windows" going, and started trying to move the windows around and resize
> them... 10 seconds to put the window in its new location. The actual
> interaction of grabbing the window and hauling it to where I wanted it was no
> problem, I guess that the interactive process runs at a higher priority than
> the process of actually moving the window. Note that "dotty windows" is a
> CPU-based process that just generates random numbers to randomly place dots
> inside its window... 
> --
> Eric Green

Just to be sure nobody gets the wrong idea - it is indeed possible to
slow down the machine to a point where you can't really get good
performance out of an interactive task.  It may come as part of a
CPU-hog program (I haven't looked at the source code yet) but I
ran into a slowdown that I hadn't expected.  I was logged into
one of the services and was downloading their message base, in ASCII
mode, with no pauses, no "CR for MORE" pause set, as a background
task, using ASCII capture mode to RAM: 
and trying to run MicroEmacs as a foreground task.  Amy did not
miss a keystroke, but kept them invisible for so long that it made
it difficult enough to use I just hadda wait till the download was
done.

I suspect that the program, COMM 1.34, might possibly be communicating
with the serial device in a gimmee-one-character-per-message-passed
mode thereby and with characters coming in continuously at 1200 baud
it may have kept the system busy enough to keep my microemacs at a
lower priority.

Though I am an Amiga-fan, I just had to say that if one program is
written incorrectly, it can, indeed, hog the system.  (By the way,
I tried the same program downloading using Xmodem, and did not
experience any slowdown).

Rob Peck                         ...ihnp4!hplabs!dsh "SE"S