On Sat, Dec 16, 2023 at 9:37 AM Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C] <l...@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov> wrote: > > > the process isn't allocated any CPU time until the timer expires. > > Almost so. But the "sleep" functions are interruptible, so if a process (the > "sleep" command) > is somehow signaled, it will wake up prematurely, and will have to either put > itself back to > sleep (for the remaining unslept time) or terminate, whatever the > implementation is. So in the > former case, there is some CPU still consumed (and that would depend on how > often the signal > arrives), and in the former case, the actual slept time can be quite > inaccurate (from what you > think it should have been). > > Signaling with scripts can be quite tricky as the signal can propagate to the > entire process > group, rather than a single process (depending on which process the signal > was sent to). > > Using cron (as others suggested) gives you a time accuracy up to a second > (give or take), but > then again it depends on the load of the system, and may drift rather > significantly. > > My $.02, > > Anton Lavrentiev > Contractor NIH/NLM/NCBI
Thank you for the answers. This is a personal computer and nothing my "services" do cares much about the actual time between runs so the uncertainty using 'sleep' isn't an issue. Back in the XP days, I used a Windows version of 'cron' to run things, but it stopped working and I just modified the small number of scripts it launched to time themselves. I was just curious as to how much of a penalty I was paying for my laziness and you've confirmed that the answer is "not much." My computer has been slowing down and I was looking for the culprit, which is most likely just increasing software bloat (wheezy voice: "In my day, 4 kB was a huge program:) My current computer is not "Win 11 ready" and I'm not replacing perfectly functional hardware, so I will be migrating to a Linux desktop in 2025 (or sooner) and will have 'cron' available again. Again, thanks for the answers. -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
