Thought

[deathboy]

Why is process priority not fundamental to modern operating systems?

Everyone knows which programs they care more about.

Give us a simple handle to say "this thing first, quickest, best / that thing... feh. later. when it's ready."

Is there something like Process Explorer that will remember the process priority I like for a program?

If you say "buy a mac", I will literally fuck your parents.

I don't even know if OS-X does that, I'm just eager for some MILF action.

Comments

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

touché.

I meant for 'doze.

I understand how it classes as a "move to *nix" argument, I just don't see why XP hasn't managed to do this, because it's not an *entirely* arse OS.

ho hum. I suffer because I suck the MSwang.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Whilst I enjoy a bit of MS-baiting as much as the next beardie-weirdie, the fact is that Windows NT (upon which 2000 and XP was based) was written from the ground-up to incorporate process priorities, and they do work. NT was based on the VMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS) operating system, for which I have a lot of respect, and is still widely used on big-grunt minicomputers in the financial industry today.

Some processor-intensive applications for NT/2K/XP, such as the VirtualDub video encoder, already provide drop-down lists for users to select priority.

DeathBoyOrScottToHisMum's issue is that outside these few key applications, the functionality to manually select process priorities on WinNT/2K/XP is almost entirely hidden from the user, which to be fair for 99.99% of desktop users is probably the right way to do things (otherwise they'll be n00bs and not understand why ramping Internet Explorer up to "highest priority", far from speeding up their downloads, actually just locks up the machine).

On further investigation it seems that the *nix nice command is part of the GNU CoreUtils for Windows (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/) package, although renice appears to be missing. The manual page for the Windows nice command (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/nice-invocation.html) states that "niceness is merely advice to the scheduler, which the scheduler is free to ignore" which may be a polite way of saying "this command doesn't actually work", but it would be worth having a try.