PA> It's documented this way

 AK> Where is that documented?

 AK>> Tried it, but the CPU load is still the same as before...

It is in the ibm toolkit docs,  but you might have to read it more than once.


 DosSleep(0) -- yield the _remainder_ of the current timeslice to
                a ready-to-run thread of equal or higher priority.

                A ready-to-run thread is one that is not blocked on a
                semaphore,  or in a device driver (getch(), for
                example),  or in DosSleep().   

                Since the foreground program usualy gets a boost, there
                are usually no other threads of equal or higher priority
                when your program is in the foreground.

                Since "Pulse" works by counting extra idle-time
                cycles,  DosSleep(0) will never effect the graph
                produced by pulse.

 DosSleep(any other value):  Round up the value to the next schedular
                event (usually 32ms);  so DosSleep(1) is the same as
                DosSleep(32).  At least one timeslice will be yielded;
                if there are no ready to run threads, the thread will
                still pause for the period.

Here is the most important part of my message:  If you have to place a
DosSleep(1) anywhere in your program (to prevent Pulse from showing too
much CPU usage),  your program needs to be redesigned for OS/2.  Your
prorgram has [a] polling loop[s],  and these are bad bad bad (and hardly
ever necessary).

The only time a pooling loop is necessary is if you are using a device that
is not interrupt driven (for example,  the Joystick port).  With such a
device,  however,  there are some techniques you can use in a device driver
to limit the impact of polling.

In all other cases,  you can replace polling loops with threads that block
(wait) on devices.  Such a thread uses 0% of the cpu when the nothing is
happening, and responds faster (since it is not in a sleep) when something
does.

You may have seen me state my first axiom of threads a few days ago:  A
thread's most important job is to do nothing very well.  I hope I have shed
some light on it with this message.  A thread that "does nothing"
with a DosSleep(x) is doing a very poor job.

If you are having trouble applying threads to your problem,  describe the
situation here and I'm sure someone will help.


--- Maximus/2 3.00