Groups > comp.lang.java.programmer > #10203

Toward more ruly background apps

From	Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject	Toward more ruly background apps
Date	2011-11-24 05:44 -0800
Organization	Canadian Mind Products
Message-ID	<2qhsc7d9ib953i1tnipa8jm7i25jbdfhpo@4ax.com> (permalink)

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I usually have at least one active background task going, e.g. defrag,
build, search and replace script, indexing, backup, Jet compile,
program load, source code tidy, email fetch, FTP upload, macro
expansion to regenerate my website ....

The problem is these often interfere with my foreground work.  I hit a
key and nothing happens for several seconds. I find it quite hard to
type word without the instant visual feedback.

The background task may be hogging the CPU or the disk.  Back in the
60s I learned about what OS's were supposed to do to ameliorate this,
giving higher priority to i/o bound tasks and higher priority to tasks
a human was sitting there waiting for.

I am using Windows 7 on a dual CPU which was orders of magnitude
resources to play with that the computers of that day, but it does not
seem to be doing all that well.

So some questions:

1. Is there anything I can do to make my OWN background Java apps
better behaved, to notice disk or CPU is tight and back off? or lower
their priority to CPU or disk?

2. Is there anything I can do to configure some sort of allocation of
the CPU and disk where various combos of app are running?

3. Is there anything I can do quickly when my computer is sluggish to
throttle but not kill the culprit?

4. Do Linux people fare any better?  I imagine most windows users have
programs in the background, but they would nearly always be idle. This
problem is likely not high on the MS priority list.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
I can't come to bed just yet. Somebody is wrong on the Internet.

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Thread

Toward more ruly background apps Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-24 05:44 -0800
  Re: Toward more ruly background apps Silvio Bierman <silvio@moc.com> - 2011-11-24 16:27 +0100
    Re: Toward more ruly background apps Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-24 08:41 -0800
      Re: Toward more ruly background apps Knute Johnson <nospam@knutejohnson.com> - 2011-11-24 09:18 -0800
  Re: Toward more ruly background apps "Jeffrey H. Coffield" <jeffrey@digitalsynergyinc.com> - 2011-11-24 07:34 -0800
    Re: Toward more ruly background apps Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> - 2011-11-24 17:12 +0100
  Re: Toward more ruly background apps Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2011-11-24 09:24 -0800
    Re: Toward more ruly background apps Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-24 15:36 -0800
      Re: Toward more ruly background apps Fistulina Hepatica <f.hep3@spore.dispersal.org> - 2011-11-24 22:29 -0500
        Re: Toward more ruly background apps "Manh Tuong Lewis Nguyen" <matln@sfu.ca> - 2011-11-25 03:01 +0000
          Re: Toward more ruly background apps thoolen <tholen01@gmail.com> - 2011-11-25 01:19 -0800
        Re: Toward more ruly background apps Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-29 16:47 -0800
  Re: Toward more ruly background apps Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-24 21:46 -0500

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