[NTLUG:Discuss] pthreads on Linux

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Saturday, August 11, Peter A. Koren did write:

<SNIP>

> My code is mainly floating point number crunching with only enough I/O
> to keep the user aware of how the run is proceeding.

<SNIP>

> My system is a dual CPU machine running an SMP kernel (2.4.3).

Ok.  Memory bandwidth limitations are beyond my expertise.  I *can* tell
you, however, that since your jobs are primarily compute-bound, then having
more threads than the number of processors is not likely to yield any
performance benefit.  In fact, it will most likely *hurt* performance, as
the overhead due to context switching takes a larger percentage of
processor time.

Richard