MiNT scheduling

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

Hello,

I have observed that when a process is running under MiNT that requires a
lot of processor time, for example raytracing, response to keypresses and
mouse clicks seems to slow down significantly.

Text mode applications seem not to be affected badly, but the response
under N.AES can become very slow. (Usually N.AES is very fast.)

This occurs even if I use Speedup to assign the highest priority to the
topmost application.

For example, at the worst times it can take up to about one second to
respond to a mouse click or keypress, and sometimes a mouse click will be
lost entirely (never responded to). (This mouse click loss only seems to
occur on window gadgets.)

It's not as though handling the mouse click is an extremely slow process,
so it seems that MiNT is giving the processor intensive process great
blocks of processor time at once, otherwise the mouse click would have
been responded too quite soon. (I'm expecting here that the mouse click
could be responded to in just one time-slice which is, I believe, 40ms.)
Is this right? What is really going on here, and how can it be improved?

-- 
Mario Becroft                        Auckland, New Zealand
mb@tos.pl.net                 http://www.pl.net/user/mario      |\__/,|   (`\
Tariland, Atari Support in New Zealand                        _.|o o  |_   ) )
tariland@tos.pl.net  http://www.pl.net/user/mario/tariland --(((---(((--------