Load control and intelligence in schedulers

[Henry Spencer]

The problem with being smart about giving higher priority to processes
that do terminal i/o is that all sorts of interesting programs start
sprouting unnecessary terminal i/o.  I know of one large, hard-crunching
compiler [name deleted to protect the guilty] which put out a NUL to
the terminal each time it read a line of source, to keep its priority
nice and high.  Argh.

I'm not saying it can't be done well, just that care is needed.  Terminal
input should be considered much more significant than output, for purposes
of scheduling.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry