Re: Yes, they are special, but...

[Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

    Date: Wed, 21 Jun 89 02:42:59 -0700
    From: gyro@drums.reasoning.com (Scott W. Layson)

    I didn't explain this very well.  Process switching during page faults
    is considered to be less important if there is only one user than if
    there are multiple users, because with only one user there is usually
    only one foreground process, so the user's perception of response time
    is not improved if other things are being done while the foreground
    process is paging.  With multiple users and multiple foreground
    processes, it makes more of a difference.

The fallacy here is that not only the foreground process may
page, and a user may have logically >1 foreground process,
e.g. two edit windows, zmail and news, edit and application,
etc. Even worse, consider applications that simulate
parallelism with multiple processes.

I agree with the telnet comments. It'd be nice to, say, be
able to invoke GNU...