bz2 & cpu usage

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 10:08:39 -0400, Brad Tilley wrote:
> The part I wrote about the "Windows GUI" is not clear. I meant the Windows
> XP Desktop. My script has no GUI. Sorry for the mix-up.

Before going too deeply into programmatic solutions, I'd try your program
on a completely different machine (different manufacturer or something so
the hardware is different). Excepting maybe priority setting, which is a
good idea anyhow.

While this was par for the course for Win9x, XP really shouldn't be
behaving like that in my experience. A little jumpy, maybe, but not
"unusable". Either:

* You're running it on a machine well below the stated XP requirements
(I've jammed XP onto a Pentium 233 w/ 96MB ram, but I don't recommend that
for most people; it was basically a server for me doing one specific
task.), or
* You're taking *way* too much data at a time, filling up your RAM, and
causing excessive swapping (though you ought to notice this), or
* You've got crappy hardware and your hardware can't handle the interrupt
load from the IO and the graphics at the same time; this is typically
caused by cheap motherboards, often from Via.

If your problem is hardware, you've pretty much already lost and your only
hope is different hardware.

Otherwise, as a hack, you can decompress as a stream and use the sleep
commands to voluntarily sleep for some period of time after some amount of
time or data has gone by, but this will still cause some jumpiness.