[Simh] Batch vs interactive

[Gary Lee Phillips]

The answer depends on what machine you are emulating and with what
operating system. Something like a VAX with OpenVMS has a lot of
tuning parameters within the operating system for balancing batch and
foreground priorities. Most systems that had simultaneous batch and
interactive operation were set up in this way. But the controls are
internal to the operating system software, not to the hardware itself
and therefore not in the purview of SIMH settings.

Or did you mean that you are letting something run on a SIMH emulation
and it gets in the way of doing other things on your host machine?
There is a setting to control the percentage of the host CPU that is
used by most SIMH emulators I've tried, though I don't know whether it
is active in all of them:

SET THROTTLE xx%

This command given at the SIMH command prompt limits the amount of CPU
that can be taken up by the SIMH emulation at any time to xx% of the
whole.

It will not, however, balance between batch and interactive processes
running within the emulation. Those will both be slowed down by an
equal amount. Tuning that balance requires internal settings in the
emulated environment.

--Gary