On 29 Jun 2000 05:02:30 -0400, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

>  That's why they are only partly pre-emptive.
>  I can make a program that completely steals all the CPU time in windows.
>  I can't do this in Unix. I can make a program that steals _most_ of the
>CPU time, but still it just can't lock up the system; other programs can
>still run and, for example, kill the resource-stealing program if necessary.
>In windows, however, it is possible to make a program that locks up the
>system completely.
>  I don't know about win2k or NT.

I can't say about win2k but my experience with NT reveals that it's
not much better in this regard (aside from being a worse CPU and RAM
hog thant Win9x). What I have in mind is a nightmare in which NT took
half an hour to boot on a K6/233 with 64 RAM, the last fifteen minutes
being spent on drawing an icon a minute on the desktop. In this
nightmare a network client was trying to connect to localhost for some
reason only known to itself and took in the process so much CPU time
that it couldn't even be killed, giving an absurd message akin to "The
network server is too busy to complete this request". The thing that
troubled me the most was that this nightmare was real. No more NT for
me since then, No Thanks.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] usanet
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

Post a reply to this message