From: Ellen K. 

What a disaster.    :(

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:05:54 +0300, "Antti Kurenniemi"
 wrote in message :

>"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)
>

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