Nice

[Richard M. Mathews]

rdavis at connie.UUCP (Ray Davis) writes:
>If it is cpu bound, then it will always use it's whole time-slice,
>which most processes under unix don't do.  This might at times
>degrade response-time, because if the proc gets the cpu, then it
>won't give it up as soon as other procs might.

Not necessarily.  In many (most?) versions of Unix if an interrupt
makes a process runnable at a higher priority than the running process,
a context switch will be forced immediately.  Since processes waiting
for something like tty input will on most systems wake up at a priority
higher than that of any user-mode process, perceived response time should
not be greatly affected.  Or so goes the theory;-)

Richard M. Mathews			D efend
richard at locus.com			 E stonian-Latvian-Lithuanian
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