From: John Beckett 

Randall Parker

wrote in message news::
> I find that Borland C++ Builder builds slow down by a few orders of magnitude
when
> BCB is in the foreground compiling and I have a bunch of browser pages in
FireFox
> pegging the CPU. I would have expected the OS to give the foreground task
more time
> to run. But maybe most of the Flash CPU overhead is in some driver and time
in the
> driver isn't doled out by the task scheduler.

Complex schedulers like that of Windows provide a certain minimum amount of
CPU time to a process once it is decided that the process deserves another
turn. The time can be abandoned if the process blocks (e.g. reads data from
disk), but if the process has calculations to do, it will get its full
period.

I have temporarily forgotten the name of the period. It's only
milliseconds, but it means that if processes are using the CPU they will
get a reasonable share. This is on the principle that you hope the process
will finish whatever work it is trying to do, rather than waste CPU cycles
switching mindlessly from one process to another.

John

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