Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 20:58:38 +0000 (GMT) From: Adam Strohl <adams@digitalspark.net> To: "William R. Somsky" <somsky@annwn.phys.washington.edu> Cc: freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Examples of FreeBSD SMP success? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9909162037530.394-100000@nightfall.digitalspark.net> In-Reply-To: <19990916171751.A19950@annwn.phys.washington.edu>
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On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, William R. Somsky wrote: > The anticipated use where dual-CPUs could help us would probably > be users either running a computation-intensive job (eg, Mathematica), > while simultaneously doing desktop editing/browsing/mailing/TeXing/etc, > or running two computation- intensive jobs. (We don't expect that > Mathematica or any user job will be multi threaded.) > > What I've been asked to find out what the state of FreeBSD SMP > support is, and if anyone has any real-world examples of using > dual-CPUs under FreeBSD that might be similar to this sort of > situation and what the results have been. > > Being as that I've not tried multi-processing under FreeBSD yet, > does anybody have any input I can give to my users? Most of the time I do exactly what you describe, run an intesive CPU app in the background, and do desktop work (netscape, vi, some light compiling) at the same time. It runs beautifully. Heavy compiles (even with my crappy IDE disks) take a little more than half the time when I gmake -j 4. Running two copies of seti@home results in twice the number of blocks being cleared in the same amount of time as 1. Desktop work as described above shows little impact. There are things holding FreeBSD SMP back (ie; the big lock in networking, IIRC) but there are TONS of cases where its speed brings a tear to my eye ;'D At this point my machine is heavily I/O bound when doing large disk intensive operations, however things like switching desktops and browsing the web, etc, still are extremely responsive. This is mostly due to FreeBSD's amazing scheduling/priority system, but its even more so on a dual system. With how cheap dual motherboards are now and celeron 370 CPUs/Socket370 -> Slot 1 bridges are its worth it. - ----( Adam Strohl )------------------------------------------------ - - UNIX Operations/Systems http://www.digitalspark.net - - adams (at) digitalspark.net xxx.xxx.xxxx xxxxx - - ----------------------------------------( DigitalSpark.NET )------- - To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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