object references/memory access

[greg]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> 	If a process is known to be CPU bound, I think it is typical
> practice to "nice" the process... Lowering its priority by direct
> action.

Yes, but one usually only bothers with this for long-running
tasks. It's a nicety, not an absolute requirement.

It seems like this would have been an even more important
issue in the timesharing environments where unix originated.
You wouldn't want everyone's text editors suddenly starting
to take half a second to respond to keystrokes just because
someone launched "cc -O4 foo.c" without nicing it.

--
Greg