🚀 go-pugleaf

In <26117@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> dor@jaialai.cis.ufl.edu (A Knight in White Satin) writes:

>I've got this troubling problem when Im downloading files while in 
>Windows.  
.....

>If disk access occurs (i.e. I open a Windows-app) the entire computer will
>come to a screeching halt and sit.  And sit.  The modem will eventually
>stop sending characters, waiting for an acknowledgement from my PC.  More
>sitting.  Suddenly, the computer will acknowledge the download and continue.
>The download resumes, and Windows gets going again.

>I have the settings for the process at 500 (foreground) and 500 (background)
>but since this is the only DOS proc I'm running, this shouldn't matter,
>should it?

No, I think you should *lower* the priority.  As I understand it (I'm
probably garbling something here, so tolerance please), your comm.
program is spending most its time waiting for i/o on the disk or the
serial port.  Waiting is not a complicated chore, so it doesn't
require a lot of CPU time.  But the program thinks it has the machine
all to itself, and will avidly consume all the CPU time you give it, since
that's what it means to wait!

I had a similar problem with Buerg's LJBOOK program, which dragged
down my system whenever I ran it.  So I set a PIF with a background
priority of 1.  (Since most of my other programs run with the default
priority, this means that LJBOOK gets one 50th of the CPU time of any
other background program.  LJBOOK works as fast as ever (all it's
doing is writing a lot of data to the parallel port), and the rest of
my system now works almost normally.

-- 

	ergo@netcom.uucp			Isaac Rabinovitch
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