Paul Iadonisi wrote:
On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 15:15 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
[snip]
Processors are not speeding up at all, to a first approximation.
Haven't you noticed? Moore's law stopped operating about two years ago.
Pedantry...
Yes, speed increases in single processors have stalled. Which is why
there are a lot more SMP and multicore systems deployed now. Clocks
per dollar seems to be continuing to rise on a roughly 2^n curve, even
though clocks per processor aren't.
But...
Unless rpm and yum are multi-threaded, this makes little difference. Are they? Seth? Jeff?
Hi,
Just , FYI,
yum, being python based might have issues with multi threaded operation.
From what I have seen in my zope digging is that python has a thingcalled the GIL (or similar?), that for most applications prevents efficient use of SMP. For a while, SMP could make things slower, but I believe now that threaded python apps behave OK on most SMP platforms. According to the info, a complete re-hash of the python interpreter would be required to give it the ability to scale well using threads on SMP architectures. Most folk seem to recommend using a multi process model for python to exploit SMP.
Regards,
Darren Steven
