[SunRescue] SS20 (??) is it really?

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Chris Conn wrote:

> Excuse my ignorane with MP platforms, but does Solaris 2.6 automatically
> use the 2nd (or more) processor for regular tasking or does each used
> application have to be coded to use a particular/multiple CPUs?
> 
> In other words, should I decide to buy another CPU for my SS20, will I
> notice a difference with performance in X or normal applications?

You will notice a speedup when you are running multithreaded code, or have
multiple CPU-consuming processes going simultaneously.  For a desktop
machine, X will seem snappier (as the server and the clients are not
fighting for the same CPU cycles) and you will notice that running large
programs does not bring the rest of your system to a screeching halt.

If you do number crunching that's parallelizable it's a big win, code that
I'm working on now actually has a superlinear speedup on most machines (it
runs 4.5x as fast on a 4-CPU U450 as it does on a 1-CPU model).

-James