Date:	Tue, 2 May 2000 13:15:27 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	"Alexei A. Frounze" <alex DOT fru AT mtu-net DOT ru>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: 3rd Try: Maybe an asm problem? (Problems linking)
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On Mon, 1 May 2000, Alexei A. Frounze wrote:

> But I don't know too much people who have more than 2 (or 3
> max) DOS programs running at once. I run 2 ones at max myself. :)
> Maybe I should more? I need to figure out a new task for me that
> would need 3 V86 tasks... :)

I usually have one DOS box dedicated to info.exe, so that I could read
the docs of any program/library whenever I need.  In addition, there's
one other box which runs Emacs, and two shell boxes, one where I
usually compile large projects, the other for mostly interactive
command-line work.  That's a total of 4 DOS boxes.

> I put the same Int 2F (1680h function) call to my Norton Commander
> clone about 3 years ago just for fun, just to make the program
> almost fully correct. Dunno, maybe I should test it with and without
> that call under taskmanager which counts CPU time for each process?
> Just to see how much time is lost, if the program runs in
> background.

With a 2Fh/1680h call in the idle loop, you should typically see no
more than 2-3% of CPU time used up by that DOS box.  Without the call,
it will be close to 100%.

> But if a program is designed not to be run in background (a simple util or a
> game, for example), I think timeslice releasing is not needed.

I think you need to release your time slice in any program, when you
know that you have nothing to do, or you are waiting for something.

> > You'd be surprised to know how many people are aware of programs which
> > use up CPU time while idling.  There were quite a few threads in this
> > group started by people who payed attention to the CPU usage on their
> > Windows systems and complained when programs like RHIDE (in its old
> > versions) were using the CPU in their idle loop.
> 
> I think playing games or doing other job on web-servers (or
> something like that) is a bit incorrect. If they ran all this stuff
> on home personal computers that don't need to do any time-critical
> job all the time, what was their problem? :)

I wasn't talking about playing games.  You will see the effect of
releasing the timeslice even if you are compiling, or doing a
CPU-intensive task in your editor.

> > So I think programmers do need to pay attention to these issues.
> 
> Maybe you're talking about advanecd programmers only? How about an average
> programmer?

I don't know the difference ;-).

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