Re[2]: [Am-info] O/S 2 support - slightly off topic (my apologies)

[Mitch Stone]

Allow me to ask a simple-minded technical question: what if anything is 
the relationship between multithreading and preemptive multitasking?

The main reason I ask, is because for years we heard that the MacOS was 
technically inferior to Windows because it used a less sophisticated 
scheme for multitasking (cooperative). This method gave explicit CPU 
priority to the front-most active application. What I've found since 
moving to the threaded OS X, is that the performance of some power-hungry 
apps suffers because these priorities can no longer be set (as readily) by 
the user.

On Saturday, March 16, 2002, at 11:38 AM, Eric M. Hopper wrote:

> On Sat, 2002-03-16 at 12:52, Gene Gaines wrote:
>> Wow, an informed discussion with "Windows" and programming
>> design/structure in the same sentence.
>>
>> I was getting resigned to that being a thing of the past.
>
> I'm giving up though.  :-)
>
> While it's likely true that the OS implementation of multithreading is
> better than Windows 95 or Windows NT's, the point is that multithreading
> is a bad idea in the first place.
>
> A bad OS implementation of multithreading doesn't cause instability
> unless it's _really_ bad.  I don't think it's that bad in NT, or a
> heavily loaded NT server wouldn't last more than 5 minutes.  As it is,
> most of them can last at least an hour or two.
>
> The thing that causes program crashes and hangs with multithreading is
> bad application usage, which is amazingly hard to prevent, and requires
> programmers of exceptional talent and skill.
>
> So, as an OS innovation goes, multithreading isn't as useful as most
> people think.  In fact, in almost all cases, you can do a better job of
> making your application snappier and more responsive without
> multithreading and its attendant tendency to make your application
> unstable and unpredictable, even in an SMP environment.
>
> I find Windows NT reliance on multithreading for any kind of performance
> at all to be indicative of poor OS design.  In fact, a lot of their
> low-level OS design seemed to be there to cash in on computer science
> fads instead of to be good.
>
> I just tend to get irritated when people wax nostalgic over OS/2,
> because in my experience, it wasn't very good.  Better than Windows,
> yes, but that's not hard.
>
> Have fun (if at all possible),
> --
> The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
> be properly armed.  -- Alexander Hamilton
> -- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.org
> http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
>
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   Mitch Stone
   mitch@accidentalexpert.com