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To: Elmer who wrote (126392)	1/31/2001 8:32:34 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: explain to me how a second processor could account for a 142% improvement? Sounds fishy to me too. There are a few housekeeping chores like monitoring keyboard, network, disk, and disk cache, that the second processor doesn't need to do, so an improvement of 101% or 103% is conceivable. But 142%? And my recollection is that there is about a 5% software hit in the kernel from running every thing through a more complex scheduler. That's why NT installs always start with the MPU kernel, then replace it with the more efficient SPU kernel if no second processor is found - the MPU kernel runs fine on an SPU system, but it's 5% slower. Linux might not have that problem (and I haven't read about it for Win2K, either, so maybe Microsoft solved it too). Maybe they were watching a DVD movie on the machine during the compile and using a software MPEG decoding routine that used up half of the first processor's cycles - that could account for the big boost from the second processor. :-) Dan

To: Elmer who wrote (126392)	1/31/2001 8:54:32 PM
From: muzosi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

One thing is that linux builds are MP aware so one would expect a ~ %100 improvement. I think the reason they are seeing a > %100 improvement is that two compiles are utilizing memory and disk resources better than a single compile. In a single compile memory is idle during everything fits in the cache and the other compile can take advantage of that in two simultaneous compile case. Muzo