Thanks for all the replies. I did try using nice under windows. I created a java program that would just loop and print numbers on the screen. Even when I ran that simple program with nice, (lets call it program A) as soon as I started the program the cpu went all the way to 100% usage. Then when I ran another program that did the same thing (lets call it program B), program A halted to let B finish, then it started again. Nevertheless it still hogged all the cpu while I was using the computer.
For my indexing program I just wrote a simple python program and called on the python os.walk() method to iterate through the drive and then it connects to a database to store some information. Then I wrote a simple interface to connect to the database to search for files using visual basic. Once everything is indexed it works fine, but it would be nice to have the program looping through and indexing the files all the time to account to file updates, deletes, and relocation, but without hurting the performance when I'm using the computer. So really what I am looking for is some way to have the program only start indexing and crawling through the hd after 5 minutes of no user interaction with the computer. I'm going to take a look at this CPU load possibility. But I'm afraid that this will work similarly to "nice" in which case it will let the program kick in when the CPU isn't being used heavily, but I might still be using the computer. thanks once again! -los -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
