Per Jessen said the following on 03/20/2010 12:43 PM:
Until you have enough load to use up more cores, there's no need to use them.
Its not simply "load", its the nature of the load. Multiple cores make sense for the big servers where there are many simulates unblocked threads of execution. For a desktop machine where there is, for the most part, 'just you' running the foreground task, they offer little advantage. Yes, you may be running a download in the background, but that's going to be IO limited, not CPU limited. In fact most of the time your computer is waiting for you to it a key. Yes, there are situations where you might need more "cpu power", but stop and think if the situation is really CPU-limited or IO-limited. The example Hans gave got the right answer from Per. The code for those applications is not multi-threaded. It _could_ be, perhaps, but it isn't. Yes, 'rsync' could be written as a producer-consumer pair of processes, but it would become more complicated, more prone to design and logic errors and less 'general'. Do you want to optimise it for two cores, and them repeat Hans' complain when you are running a 4-core desktop? -- HTTP is like being married: you have to be able to handle whatever you're given, while being very careful what you send back. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org