[plug] SMP vs memory, was: *athon

Trevor Phillips phillips at central.murdoch.edu.au
Thu Jul 22 13:56:03 WST 1999


Mike Holland wrote:
> 
> But doesnt timesharing do a similar thing? If Vmware is hogging the CPU,
> other processes will be given priority and run fairly normally.

It's timesharing, except you have double the MHz to share amongst processes.
So if you have ONE process thrashing, then it can thrash away on one CPU,
leaving an entire other CPU free for the rest of the not-so-thrashing tasks.
So, if you had dual 400's, then you'd have 800MHz of grunt for all the
processes, except "one" process can only take a maximum of 400MHz of that
grunt (not counting SMP-savvy processes).

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Technical Officer         -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
 >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
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| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
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