More Processes

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

Daniel Veillard wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

> If it was the company's money, you should just get another Sun box.

 DV>   Could you justify  a bit ? The Linux-SMP mailling-list
 DV> (where I  redirected DC) has a fair amount of people using
 DV> Quad PPros or Quad Xeon in very intensive computations.
 DV> Considering that such a machine can be had for 25000$, and
 DV> can certainly compete for CPU power with Sun boxes costing a
 DV> lot more, I just wonder.
 DV>   Or do you mean that on company's money is less is best
 DV> spent buying a branded Unix box, even if it's N times more
 DV> expensive. 

Linux SMP is very good.  There are many significant improvements in 2.1.x over
2.0.x, and these will presumably appear in 2.2.x shortly.

What I meant was that you are always better off developing on a platform as
nearly similar as possible to the eventual target production platform. 
Especially with something like SMP, Solaris and Linux may have quite different
ideas about how to split up the parallelizable jobs.  You could easily see
performance differences which are radically at variance with expectations
extrapolated from measurements of raw CPU power, for example.  This also
involves non-standard definitions of execution units, such as threads and
lightweight processes, and what amount of baggage they must carry around.

It is not branded Unix which I see as a worthwhile expenditure per se, but
rather the value of running on the same platform for both development and
production.  If you ran SMP Linux for both, that might well be technically
reasonable, but it would certainly be a harder sell.
 
-- Mike


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