From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id OAA27193; Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:11:14 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA26750 for ; Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:11:13 +0100 (MET) Received: from inria.fr (macaque.inria.fr [128.93.8.158]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id gARDBCX00354 for ; Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:11:12 +0100 (MET) Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:12:34 +0100 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Why systhreads? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v548) From: Damien Doligez To: caml-list@inria.fr Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20021125134858.037b4ef8@localhost> Message-Id: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.548) Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 23:20 Europe/Paris, Chris Hecker wrote: > However, HT changes the cost/benefit equation. How much remains to be > seen, of course. Do you really think so ? In my experience, 95% of the costs of threads (with shared memory) are in the debugging (of the threads implementation, AND of the programs). Cheap SMP machines and HT do not change the cost/benefit equation very much. More important, you don't need threads and shared memory to make use of a SMP machine. Any kind of parallelism will do. Several processes with message-passing can easily get you 100% load on all your processors. Also, message-passing is more general; for example it will work on clusters. So my opinion is: multiprocessing good, threads bad. -- Damien ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners