License: GNU GPL
OS: Unixes
Description:
This very simple program reduces the performances of the computer: it creates (through Unix.fork() ) a number of processes which continuously perform useless floating point computations.
Code: Select all
Tame Performance Hog
usage: hog [options]
-n <int> number of hog processes to create [def=13]
--help | -h display this help page
In a fit of nostalgia, I tried to make some very old (10+ years) games run on my Linux system, using Wine. But those games were written in days when nearly all personal computers (capable of running those games) had 75 MHz to 166 MHz cpus; so they did not bother to cap the speed at which the animations (ingame spin and lipsynch) were played. So when those games are run on a modern computer, they become absolutely unplayable since everything tends to happen 20 times too fast. And running just one infinite loop in the background is useless now that processors have several cores; you need to run a fair number of them. Hence this small program.
I found that, on a "Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz", using hog -n 10 to hog -n 15 made the games I tried perfectly playable.
Tested with games:
Versailles: Complot à la Cour du Roi Soleil (1996)
Egypt 1156 B.C.: Tomb of the Pharaoh (1997)
Atlantis: Tales of a Lost World (1997)
Chine: Intrigue dans la Cité Interdite (1998) (screenshots)
