On this page you may modify the CONFIG.SYS settings which affect the OS/2 scheduler.

For an explanation of what the scheduler does, please read the respective chapter in the "Introduction" of the XFolder Online Reference.

If the information on this page regarding the different CONFIG.SYS settings is not sufficient for you, you'll find additional explanations in the respective chapters of the OS/2 Online Reference.

Press "Apply" to have the changes you've made written to the CONFIG.SYS file. This will only change the CONFIG.SYS lines which correspond to the settings on this page. The lines corresponding to the other pages in the "OS/2 Kernel" object will not be changed. This button is only active if you have made any changes to the settings on this page. Please note that you will have to restart the computer to let the changes take effect. A WPS restart does not suffice.

Press "Optimize" to have XFolder propose you new settings according to your system characteristics. CONFIG.SYS will only be changed after you press "Apply" also.

Press "Default" to have the OS/2 default settings displayed on the notebook page. CONFIG.SYS will only be changed after you press "Apply" also.

The "Current thread count" display shows you the total number of currently running threads on your system. This display is continually updated: if you start a new program you'll see that the thread count will increase.

The "Maximum thread count" setting represents the THREADS setting in CONFIG.SYS. Here you can determine how many threads OS/2 will be able to handle altoghether. The maximum value is 4096. You can reduce the scheduler's overhead and memory consumption by reducing this number. If you don't use any network functions, a number of 256 should be sufficient. Please note however that your system might crash without further warning if you set this number too low. As a rule of thumb, you can use the "Current thread count" displayed above and add 50% to that number. This should give you enough security.

The "Allow priority boost" setting represents the MAXWAIT setting in CONFIG.SYS. This setting determines how many seconds a thread that is ready to execute will get processor time although other threads have a higher priority level. This setting only affects threads of the "regular" priority class. The default value is three seconds, which I consider an appropriate value for fast computers (Pentium or better). However, if you have a slower system (486) you might experience a better system response if you lower this setting to 2 or 1 second(s). By lowering this value "background" threads will be given more processor time, but at the cost of the "foreground" threads, which will be interrupted more often. Experiment with this setting to find out which value suits best your system. You should not however set a number larger than 3 seconds. IBM has recommended that you should lower this setting if you use a lot of DOS/Windows applications, but you should NOT lower it if you don't have much memory on your system and therefore OS/2 works on the swap file a lot.

The "Privilege foreground disk I/O" setting represents the PRIORITY_DISK_IO setting in CONFIG.SYS. If this setting is enabled (which is the default), a foreground process will get privileged access to drives compared to the background processes. As a result, the foreground session will have a better response time, at least when it is accessing the disks on your system. You may want to disable this setting if you're frequently running software in the background with heavy drive access, such as compilers.