Bang for the Buck, comparing Celerons to Xeons (and PIIIs?)

[Alan DuBoff]

Griffin McKinney wrote:

> Yes you can, as it's a make option and not a OS option.

It's not an option with Sun's make, the reccomended tools to use on Solaris,
even with egcs.

> As with Solaris, it
> doesn't matter how many processors you have, you can -j yourself until your
> system dies.

Actually I got some very strange results using -j with no argument, which
tells make to use unlimited processes...I don't think that would be the way I
want to use it...;-)

> Don't get me wrong, Solaris' SMP is absolutely awesome. Until you've seen an
> E6k with a load average of 400+, and still decent responsiveness, you've never
> seen performance. ;>

This is the real advantage that Solaris has over Linux, IMO, SMP. Even on dual
and quad Intel boxes, Solaris x86 can put a whoopin' on Linux. But Linux is
catchin' up and Linux has the mindshare of the market. Linux is more fun to
work on as well, IMO.

> But -j is a make option, telling make how many concurrant jobs to run. The OS
> takes care of the sequencing, if it can.

Yes, but on Solaris I believe the kernel is dual threaded, so it can kick
those off anyway. The Solaris kernel has the ability to create system and user
threads if I'm not mistaken.

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.