Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-programming (118 mails)

[Michael Stevens <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 16 April 2005 04:59, Colin Carter wrote:
> On Saturday 16 April 2005 00:44, Stefan Hundhammer wrote:
> > On Friday 15 April 2005 14:43, Colin Carter wrote:
> > > Yes, I have noticed how most modern programs waste time poling the
> > > mirriad of open windows ....
> >
> > Urgh - folks, can we stop the urban legends at some point, please?
> >
> > Everybody who has a minimum clue of how any kind of GUI programming works
> > should know that those programs spend most of their time waiting on a
> > socket, waiting for user input - on X11 (no matter what toolkit is being
> > used - KDE, Gtk, OSF/Motif, Xt, ...) and on Win32. There is no "busy
> > wait" in any such program I know.
>
> Sorry mate - no myth.
> While working in the UK I became very frustrated waiting for some
> not-so-large number-cruncher to execute.  I noticed that if I closed or
> covered all windows I could then the code ran faster.  The young guy (an
> exceptional young programmer) revisited his code and 'disabled' every
> button on the screen except 'stop' and the execution time changed from over
> 10 minutes to less than one minute.  You will also find that if your very
> simple window covers the desktop the code runs faster.  Well, in M$ anyway;
> I'm a Linux Newbie.

Certainly such accidental coupling of execution to display code is not 
uncommon. You just need to watch the Buttons flicker on the YaST 'System 
Backup' applet to realise this even happens to SuSE!

Michael

-- 
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Michael Stevens Systems Engineering

34128 Kassel, Germany

Navigation Systems, Estimation  and
                 Bayesian Filtering
    http://bayesclasses.sf.net
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