I think you can keep your sleep commands in your program to keep it from hogging the cpu even when you are running it as nice.
You know, even more important than cpu load (since your indexer is accessing the hard drive, is hard drive access..) You can monitor the bytes / second going to the hard drives using a WMI query similar to the one that gives you LoadPercentage for a cpu. If something Is trying to read and write to the hard drive, and your indexer is going at the same time, hard drive head contention can slow down both processess to a crawl. (Say your program is in C:/apps and another program is simutaneously trying to read from C:/data... the heads have to seek back and forth between the two spots on the hard drive, and it's much faster to do all the C:/apps accesses and then later do all the C:/data accesses.) So I think my approach would be to have the indexer take about 10% of cpu load while it is active, and as soon as another process is doing enough reading / writing to the hard drive, stop and wait for about five minutes... then continuing. The screen saver idea is another good one. I found this the other day... http://homepage.hispeed.ch/py430/python/win32screensaver-0.3.2.zip The problem is that any potential user that really likes their pretty screen saver (Helios under Ubuntu... droool............ slurp.) then they can't have both your indexer and their pretty screensaver active during idle time. -Jim On 23 May 2005 10:32:18 -0700, los <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for all the replies. > > I did try using nice under windows. I created a java program that > would just loop and print numbers on the screen. Even when I ran that > simple program with nice, (lets call it program A) as soon as I started > the program the cpu went all the way to 100% usage. Then when I ran <snip> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list