Helmut Metzdorf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > so, what to do now?
Assuming I understand you correctly, and this is a program of your own, add a call to nanosleep(2) at an appropriate point. You can tune the positioning and duration of the sleep to balance your needs. Note that what would be really nice here would be something like a "defer()" which just handed the rest of the processes timeslice back to the scheduler, but I don't know if such an animal exists. Perhaps nice(1) will get the same effect. The reason to prefer defer() to nanosleep() is that if there are no other processes that need to do useful work, you don't want to be sleeping. Oh, and if you're using IDE drives (and presuming switching to SCSI isn't an option :>), you might investigate hdparm. It could be that one of it's options could help (specifically check out interrupt unmasking, but be careful...) -- Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930