More Mac OS 9-like multitasking

chucker

http://home.comcast.net/~jeff.ulicny/software/



Speed Freak might have it. I tried it for a while and, uh, I don't notice any kind of difference. What it does is give the frontmost app a renice of -15 after a delay of 5 seconds, and all other apps a renice of +5. These three values can, of course, be changed.



The behaviour is probably supposed to be closer to what Mac OS 9 did. Like I said, though, I just fail to see much of a difference... bummer.



Also, the GUI is definitely *not* any good. It shouldn't be a window (at least not a permanent one), it shouldn't be brushed metal, the button shouldn't be like that (WHY ), etc.

airsluf

Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

karl kuehn

AirSluf: While your points are valid, I think that you do have to count MacOS 9's cooperative multitasking as multitasking... just multitasking that was easily broken by poor programming. One badly written application could hog all of the resources. Pre-emptive multitasking takes the burden/options away from the developer (MacOS X does have some real-time options that not many people use), and assigns the work to the OS. Generally a better idea in my mind.



This is more about who do you trust, the OS developer, or all of the app developers. Oh... and about how many processor cycles do you have to burn.

dobby

Quote:

Originally posted by Karl Kuehn

AirSluf: While your points are valid, I think that you do have to count MacOS 9's cooperative multitasking as multitasking... just multitasking that was easily broken by poor programming. One badly written application could hog all of the resources. Pre-emptive multitasking takes the burden/options away from the developer (MacOS X does have some real-time options that not many people use), and assigns the work to the OS. Generally a better idea in my mind.



This is more about who do you trust, the OS developer, or all of the app developers. Oh... and about how many processor cycles do you have to burn.

Considering you couldn't copy (over a network) and browse the internet without slowing down the copy speed I would say OS 9 is as multitasking capable as Windows is secure.



Dobby.

buonrotto

If you want a processor hog for your multi-tasking, just keep Adobe apps in the foreground.

aquatic

chucker I've also noticed using Renicer et al that renicing things doesn't do much. I give something -20 and nothing is different. It offers to make the change "stick." How does it do that, is there a preference somewhere for nice settings for apps?



Also, MacOS X still seems like OS 9 sometimes as far as a multitasking GUI is concerned. Hold down a menu in Safari and pages stop loading. Hold down the mouse in Finder and it stops updating.

atomicham

Quote:

Originally posted by Aquatic

Also, MacOS X still seems like OS 9 sometimes as far as a multitasking GUI is concerned. Hold down a menu in Safari and pages stop loading. Hold down the mouse in Finder and it stops updating.

Threads (an application is a thread) are multi-tasked. Every thread gets time by the CPU. Safari is not threaded very well, so, in a basic sense, if the Safari thread is working, it won't allow you to do anything else in that thread. Meanwhile, click over to another application, notice everything is responding and working while Safari is in the background? An application is a single thread by default. The application can create its own threads that get executed by the OS. If an application doesn't create separate threads, the app can stop responding while doing work.



What I am saying is that this is the fault of Safari not the OS. Safari is (in my opinion) rather poorly threaded. If they spawned a thread for rendering the page, and had a separate UI thread, you wouldn't notice a difference and things wouldn't "hang" while it loaded a page.

aquatic

Aye. What about when I renice everything in Speedfreak down 100% and frontmost app up 100%? It doesn't seem to do anything...curious. I was trying to make Command and Conquer Generals a little faster. I'm already playing it on speed of 60 and it's about the speed of 30 on my roommates' pc! ack!

dfryer

This is probably because stuff in the background *isn't using much processor anyway*, especially compared to games(which often run at 100% cpu anyway)

silentechoes

Quote:

Originally posted by Aquatic

I'm already playing it on speed of 60 and it's about the speed of 30 on my roommates' pc! ack!

What type of machine do you have? I found that I set the settings on low or medium and then do an OpenGL overide (via ATI Utilities) The game looks fine and runs fine. Which is pretty impressive for a Dual 533, Or a single 533 in this case as the game does not take advantage of dual processors.



Then again I could be just trying to convince myself I don't need a new machine yet.

aquatic

PB 12" 867 mhz 640 RAM GeForce2Go w/ 32 VRAM. Settings on low. What is this OpenGL override stuff? Sounds Ati only.