Hi, since hyperthreading and multi-core CPUs are becoming more and more common, I think we should put a little more focus on making use of these features. For that reason, I have made --enable-mp the default in CVS HEAD and also changed the gimprc preference so that GIMP uses 2 processors. This default doesn't have necessarily have to make it into the next stable release. The main concern now should be to make sure that it works at all. I had a look at the current implementation and also cleaned up the code a little. We are talking about app/base/pixel-processor.[ch]. There seems to be room for improvement. I'd like to hack on this myself but my time is limited, so I thought I'd ask if someone else would like to take this job. So here are some ideas of what could be changed: - Port the thread code to g_thread functions to make it more portable. That would probably be necessary since we don't want to maintain our own thread abstraction layer. It would mean that we would have to call g_thread_init(). I am not sure if that would introduce any noticeable overhead on systems that only use a single CPU. Might be worth to investigate that. - Use GThreadPool instead of continuously starting new threads. Creating a thread has a considerable overhead. The current implementation continuously creates new threads that finish after they have done their job. GLib provides a GThreadPool that would probably fit nicely here. As you can see, this is a rather small task coding-wise. It would however be good to also do some benchmarking to find out how much overhead is introduced by using the threaded pixel-processor. We don't want to make things worse for single-CPU systems. Any volunteers? Sven
