Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!CIM-VAX.HONEYWELL.COM!"ANIMAL::ERSTAD"
From: "ANIMAL::ERSTAD"@CIM-VAX.HONEYWELL.COM
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Suspending processes (was questions for the gurus)
Message-ID: <880915080458.00000150031@cim-vax.HONEYWELL.COM>
Date: 15 Sep 88 13:04:58 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 14

One method of suspending a process which works reasonably is to set the
priority of the process to 1/1, starting another process at priority
2/2, and doing a command like "while ((1=1)) do enddo" in the new shell.
This is a little kludgy, but does work.  Although the while process
gets lots of cpu time, it doesn't really interfere with rest of node
operation since there is so little context associated with it.

This especially helps if you have background jobs which require large
amounts of memory - the problem is not usually processor utilization, 
it's that while your thinking about your next keystroke the OS pages
out all of your data and pages in all the background data - to 
process the keystroke requires the reverse to take place before any
action can occur.  It's not really that straightforward, but if you
think of it that way you won't go too wrong.