Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 13 Jun 2001 19:31:39 +0200 | From | bert hubert <> | Subject | Re: threading question |
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On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 12:06:40PM -0700, Kip Macy wrote: > This may sound like flamebait, but its not. Linux threads are basically > just processes that share the same address space. Their performance is > measurably worse than it is on most commercial Unixes and FreeBSD.
Thread creation may be a bit slow. But the kludges to provide posix threads completely from userspace also hurt. Notably, they do not scale over multiple CPUs.
> They are not, or at least two years ago, were not POSIX compliant > (they behaved badly with respect to signals). The impoverished
POSIX threads are silly with respect to signals. I do almost all my programming these days with pthreads and I find that I really do not miss signals at all.
> from Larry McVoy's home page attributed to Alan Cox illustrates this > reasonably well: "A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people > who can't program state machines." Sorry for not being more helpful.
I got that response too. When I pressed kernel people for details it turns out that they think having hundreds of runnable threads/processes (mostly the same thing under Linux) is wasteful. The scheduler is just not optimised for that.
Regards,
bert
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