[time-nuts] Lady Heather Overhead
Mark Sims
holrum at hotmail.com
Thu Dec 31 20:22:42 UTC 2009
An idle Windows machine allocates 50% of its resources to a task when it starts up. This shows up as 50% CPU utilization. A second Heather will show as around 100% total utilization (50 % each). These usage numbers are totally bogus.
Heather VERY periodically returns it's time slot to the system with the flag that says, "Hey, if you aren't doing anything else, I'd kinda like that time back.". So if you bring up four Heathers, each will then show 25% utilization, etc. I have seen a dozen Heathers running on a fairly slow machine (and quite a sight it is).
Basically all the Heathers soak up all the free time on the system and share it amongst themselves. The program runs just fine on a 100 MHz WIN98 laptop. If you are actually using a full core, you have other problems...
There is a recently added command line flag (/tw=msecs) that says to force Sleep(msecs) calls in place of Sleep(0) calls. It slows the system response time down, but might be useful for power saving on laptops, etc.
Mark John
from a nut post:
> do know that
>
there is a fair amount of processor load, including a lot of system
>
calls. On my system, running LH under wine takes the equivalent of 1
> CPU
on my quad core.
I'm sure not new to you and I hardly know what
I'm talking about BUT what I have noticed is:
MY LadyHeather programs
will take all the spare windows processor time available even on my fastest
windows XT machine.
And then again I have no trouble running at
least four simultaneous LH programs (even different versions) all at the
same time on a slow machine, so they don't need much, they'll just
take whatever is available, but they seem to share
well.
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