On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:07 PM Jon Brase <jon.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/9/21 4:35 PM, dmccunney wrote: > > As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound. > > The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to > > be read from/written to disk. > > Actually, as a general rule, on a consumer machine, both the CPU and the > disk spend most of their time waiting for user input to give them > something to do. Disk waits are nothing compared to the eternity between > the keystrokes of a fast typist, and that's if the user is neither away > nor lost in thought.
I can't agree. We are not in the single-user, single tasking DOS days when one thing was going on at a time. At any moment, there are a number of things going on in a current consumer computer. Some of them will be OS routines, and some will be programs. Users may well start a program that will take time to do what it does (like compile code to create an executable,) push it into the background, and do other things in the foreground. There may be an audio program so they can listen to music while they do things like work on code in an editor, or review documentation, and a download manager or a torrent client uploading/downloading in the background. The human is the slowest component in the chain, but waiting for the human is *not* the only thing that machine will be doing. I have occasionally started long running processes and gone to bed, assuming they would be domn in the morning. I'm out of the loop, but the machine is not in a wait state. It's still doing work. _____ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
