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Re: self-paging


From: Bas Wijnen
Subject: Re: self-paging
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:40:36 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.11

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:44:03AM -0700, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> > Consider a fractal generator.  If you want generation to be fast, you
> > minimize the window so it doesn't waste time on drawing intermediate
> > states.  It is not desirable if that means the generation is even slower
> > because much of its resources are revoked.
> 
> That's probably a bad example.  Fractals must always be drawn as they are
> generated, since that is the definition of generating a fractal.  Perhaps
> you mean that a fractal will generate faster if the drawing bitmap is not
> copied to screenspace, and there is probably some truth to that.

I'm not that knowledgeble about fractal generation, so you're probably right.
Anyway, I was talking about any process which I want to do a computation which
takes so long that I want to do something else while it's running.  If I
choose to do that something else on the computer, and it is even
resource-intensive (say I'll go watching Conway's game of life on a huge
grid), then that doesn't mean I want all the resources to go to the foreground
application.

> I was trying to think of a better example for you, but I couldn't think of
> any.  You always want background programs to run as fast as possible without
> interfering with your foreground session.

In some cases it is very acceptable if it does interfere with the foreground
session.  Obviously this shouldn't happen without the user explicitly asking
for it.

Thanks,
Bas

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