Sean O'Rourke wrote:
Why is it that we have "nice" for our mostly-idle CPUs, but no
way to say "sorry, Dashboard, you only get 30 megs -- deal with
it"? It's only been, what, a decade since CPU speed has been all
but meaningless? I'm normally a big fan of the best technology
of the 70s and 80s, but in this case...
An even simpler feature I miss is a way to say "please always leave me 5% of the
CPU and 5% of RAM so that when a process decides it needs all the system
resources and then some I can kill it without killing everything else".
For example, recently I had to kill this kind of process. After several minutes
Alt-F-something worked and I got a shell. It took the shell about 15 minutes to
interpret the following sequence I apparently typed:
$ toptop # mmmm, how do I say there's no such thing in a polite way?..
$ ls # mmmm, there are so many files here...
$ top # wow, THAT'S ONE HUGE PROGRAM TO RUN. wait... wait...
At least top was responsive. Except for a somewhat stupid question ("which
signal do you want to use in order to kill the process?" - COME ON, don't you
see that we have AN EMERGENCY here?? Just KILL IT!!), it was the perfect assassin...
