terminate a program gracefully from a thread

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 12:18 AM, Dave Angel <davea at davea.name> wrote:
> Alternatively,  rethink the need to preload at boot time.  Any
>  caching the OS does is likely to only last a few minutes,
>  depending on load. So maybe you can make the real load seem to be
>  quicker by displaying the gui right away,  but doing the
>  time-consuming part in a thread.

I second this motion. Don't preload stuff on boot like that; if you
want the data preloaded, actually load the program and keep it
running. Depending on the OS/FS cache like that is a bit better than
what seems to proliferate on Windows ("MS Office fast-load" being one
of the worst offenders), where there's this constant fight between
boot time and program load time, with RAM usage going nuts in between.
By (ab)using the disk cache like this, you make your cache work
beautifully until some app actually needs all that RAM, and then your
cache will be dropped; which is a good thing for the system, but it
means you'll have completely wasted the loading effort. Much better to
be more explicit about it, and probably just accept that first startup
is slower.

ChrisA