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On Sun, 25 Mar 2001 19:09:02 +0200, Steiner wrote:
On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 10:03:01AM -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
How does idle time accrue *to a process*? Idle time is when the CPU
is not executing any process.
Just like the brain, your computer can not `do nothing'. `Idle' time
would most likely be spent in some sort of loop, possibly a HLT
loop, keeping your CPU cool :-)
Very true, AFAIK. This can be especially important with portable
computers, which can be improperly cooled.
As Brian said, Windows gives a small share of CPU time to every
process (this can be observed by running a game or other program that
uses 100% CPU; when you look back, Prime95 will have been running at
ten percent or less of normal speed (I've seen timings go from 76 ms
to 2 seconds), but it will not have stopped completely.
IIRC, this is part of the reason some other operating systems are
slightly better - they allow a program to sleep and wait for an
event, such as a mouse click, and begin running only when it needs to
deal with said event.
Nathan
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