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Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:11:10 -0700
Message-ID: <dd6fe68a0910210911x354681bdi143ac8be2de30fb0@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Barrelfish
From: Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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> Can you give one example of a slow task that you think cannot benefit muc=
h from
> parallel processing?

Rebuilding a venti index is almost entirely I/O bound.
You can have as many cores as you want and they
will all be sitting idle waiting for the disks.  Parallel
processing helps only to the extent that you can run
the disks in parallel, and they're not multiplying quite
as fast as processor cores.

> Perhaps you have a couple of videos to recode? =C2=A0Then you can achieve
> close to 100% utilization.

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-12-13/

Russ