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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:39:31 -0400
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To: hackers@freebsd.org
From: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. NT Stability
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>E-mail message from Igor Khasilev contained:
>> 
>> > So my question is: how does NT behave when it has to schedule between a 
>> > large number of processes each with its own process context, VM, page
tables 
>> > etc?  Conversely how does the unix program behave when linked with
-lpthreads
>> > and with `fork()' replaced with `pthread_create()'?
>> 
>> One bad thing with user level threads (actualy pthreads that I used):
>> sheduler which runs on user lever ALWAYS consume processor time (even wnen
>
>Only when *really* poorly implemented.  Otherwise it waits in select(2) to
>be awaken by the incoming traffic or that the timeout fires (condition timed
>wait, for instance.)  When all threads are blocked, no VTALRM's should be
>scheduled (I don't know if CAP's pthread implements the last optimization.)

This is all very nice, but on a macro level NT has two very obvious problems to
consider:

1) Its rather new...
2) It was written by Microsoft

Much more significant than the above....

Dennis