Interesting analysis of linux kernel threading by IBM

[Rik van Riel]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

> Yes, but I'm one of those freaks who has 2-3 compiles running
> continuously.  And some monitoring stuff that doesn't sleep as
> much as I wish it did....  (Actually, it is mostly sleeping right
> now; I'm holding off building stuff until I get the machine
> upgraded.)

I will tell you where your overhead is. The overhead in doing
things like that is in repopulating the cache after each context
switch. When you have two gcc's running on a fairly large data
set, the cache on your processor will be useless after a context
switch (since the data of the previous process is there and not
the data of the current process).

The scheduling overhead is minute compared to the cache misses
each context swich brings you.

regards,

Rik
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