Have other apps run, too

[Karen Baog]

I have a Java app that uses threads.
Question is, how do you get it to yield so other (non-java) apps can have a chance to run, too?

yield() don't work. Or is it dependent on the OS?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Normally this should be the operating system's responsibility, but on some old systems, the OS really doesn't do it well (Windows 95/98/ME, for example, or a phone).

If you call Thread.sleep(), the OS ought to be able to schedule other applications while yours is sleeping. You're correct that yield() would have no effect on such a system.

[Karen Baog]

Yep. I noticed that on W2000 OS it hardly relinquishes it. XP manages it better.

What can I do as I have it running on W2000?

I don't want to use sleep().

[Henry Wong]

Well, you could try to bump the priority of the other program -- by running it via the "start" command specifying a priority.

Henry

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Windows 2000 should multitask just as well as XP -- XP is pretty much the same OS, with a prettier face. Does the W2000 machine perhaps not have enough memory to swap your applications in and out efficiently?

[Martin Mathis]

Originally posted by Karen Baog:
I don't want to use sleep().

Just curious, but what's wrong with using sleep()?

[Oliver Smith]

Presumably it's not fine grained enough. Maybe you don't want to force your thread to always wait 1 second between iterations of a loop, but you don't mind if it does because other threads are busy.

I like to think yield() should be along the lines of "sleepUntilMyNextSliceIfThereAreThreadsInReadyState". If the rest of the threads are all sleeping or pending, then yield() should more-or-less do nothing.