From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

"John Beckett"  wrote
in message news:3ef82ea8.11895574{at}216.144.1.254...
> > 1.  If you open a DOS program, the CPU zooms up to 100% (ergo slowing
> > everything else down) until you close it.    I think this one is pretty
> > well known.   You can see it for yourself by opening edit from the
> > command line.
>
> Opening Edit would not do this. There are *some* programs that
> behave as Antti explained, but in general DOS programs do not
> have this effect under NT/W2k/XP.

You're going to love this one: our current database system's clients have a
busy loop whenever they're waiting on the server, and they yank their own
priority up for that time, so you can't really do anything else with any
other app on that computer until the client receives whatever it is waiting
for.

A client can wait for a report, for example, for fifteen minutes. So, when
the application is waiting, it is forcing the user to wait, too. What a
brilliant implementation! And it's a Windows app alright, no old DOS stuff
in it (they've never even had a DOS based version as far as I know).

And it gets better: when you run a maintenance routine (like, a calculation
that updates tomorrows delivery plans or something like that), the whole
system is dedicated to that one process - no other process will continue,
even if on completely different tables, not even reading or browsing the
data is possible. So, whenever one of our 50 or so users launches a
maintenance routine, we have all the other systems go to 100% CPU on an
above normal priority - so we have 49 people sitting there, idle,
waiting... waiting... waiting... and no, there is no way to display any
progress indicator to them, so they just sit there waiting... waiting...

It's funkier than anything else at times, unless you need to get some work
done 


Antti Kurenniemi
(No, I wasn't there when that system was chosen, so I couldn't do anything
about it. We're stuck now, at least for a while)

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4