Nice processes slow printing to a crawl.

[Robert Dick <dickrp%dickrp.remote.princeton.edu@localhost>]

Whenever I have a task running in the background, even if
it is at an extremely high niceness level, printing slows
down to a crawl.

Example:
In one window I type the following...
nice +19
while (1)
ls /etc
end

In another window (shell at niceness = 0) I copy fred.lj to
/dev/par0.

4 mins/page.  When I kill the nice ls loop, 4 pages/min.

I assume that once every 10 quantum or so the priority of
the ls loop dips below that of the cp and a partial
transfer is interrupted and must be restarted from
scratch.  I'm not sure what is really going on, though.

Normal interactive things are not slowed down to a crawl,
just printing.  X11 stuff is fine, Even my ppp link does
fine.

I couldn't find anything related to this in the mailing list
archives but it's not the sort of thing one would
notice unless he keeps demanding but high-niceness tasks
running in the background while printing.

Thanks for any help,

-Robert Dick (dickrp%wckn.dorm.clarkson.edu@localhost)-

NetBSD 1.2
Amiga 3000, Cyberstorm M-II '060
36 megs fast RAM
HP LaserJet 5l