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cpu at 100% utilization

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by craig_pressing

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running an old dos-based 16 bit application in a dos window on nt server 4.0; when the application is open but idle task manager shows cpu usage at 100% when the application is active cpu usage drops dramatically and then increases back to 100% whenthe application returns to an idle state; this causes a very sluggish repsonse to all other requests made on the server; even unlocking screen server takes an excessive amount of time; what may be causing this problem?

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by opatzg9

If you have the source code to the DOS application I would put in some pauses to slow it's processes down. I wrote a program a while back which checked directories for existence of files to perorm certain tasks and without pauses it pounded the server to the point where it was hard to get anything done. That was running on an old 386 machine, imagine what a pc of todays power could do to a server.

by craig_pressing

this is a vendor supplied application, we have no source code. is there any to run this in 'background'? is there a way to reduce the cpu usage if the application is not the window currently 'in focus'? i have seen the cpu usage drop by almost 50% at times when the dos window was not the current active window; when the dos window became the active window cpu usage went back up to 100% however this happens very infrequently; SP6a is installed on the server.

by opatzg9

Another option would be to look for some other old dos programs, slow.com comes to mind. It was either a shareware/freeware or part of the old central point utilities. It was used on old programs to slow them down when they ran to fast on newer machines. I'm not a windows nt expert but in windows 3.1 and I believe 98 you can set what percent of the pc's resources sould be available when running in backround. I'm not sure if you had to create a pif file to getthat setting however.Otherwise see if you can get a hold of the source code from the vendor if they're still in existence or perhaps they have an update for NT.
Good luck

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