Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I know that there's an idle process (#0), an init process (#1), and many other
> processes in a computer. Idle time accrues to the idle process. What I don't
> understand is how 2:43 of the idle time was accounted to prime95 and the other
> seventeen seconds to other processes - it should all have been accounted to > the
>idle process.
Bit late I know, but there are two other reasons for acruing idle time:
1. My Win95 system always started with ~23 seconds of idle time accumulated. On my
system this implied that the counter started before the video display had even been
initialised, which makes sense. The kernel is alive and counting long before you see
your desktop, and it isn't until later that prime95 starts.
2. When prime95 (and mprime) communicates with the server, calculations stop. In fact
this can't be helped. If a calculation has just finished then clearly no more work can
be done. If a calculation is in progress it's possible to envisage "update"
connections running as a parallel thread, but that could lead to race conditions if
the work completes just as the communication is going on. (That's one guess on why
it's single threaded, oh and it's a lot simpler to program!)
(Note: My prime95 was replaced by mprime on Linux 6 months ago. If anyone was
wondering about file format compatibility, I found that the prime95 file format is
directly compatible with mprime.)
Yours,
======= Gareth Randall =======
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