🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003 04:14:11 GMT, Chris244@aol.com (Chris Hill) wrote:

>Even 100 is a large number of threads.  If your threads are often
>blocked waiting for I/O it doesn't hurt to have quite a few to
>simplify the sturcture of your code.  If all of the hundreds of
>threads are CPU bound, some percentage of the available CPU time will
>be wasted with the administrative overhead of switching between the
>threads.

I haven't delved into how Win32 handles this(and maybe 9x is different
than NT flavors) but I know in the old days when OS/2 2.x worried about
being run on 386 machines they "cheated" by just switching the value
in the TSS(this is just from memory so I may get the tasking mechanism
wrong) instead of reloading all the valid info to try to cut down on the
switching overhead.  As I remember there were plenty of threads running,
even when not all that much was going on.  What killed it was when some
communications sw tried to bump up priority to hog the CPU.

I would think with Pentium+ machines it wouldn't be all that much
of an issue.  Processes might be another story where you really
have to save some state.

-- 

"Only choice is an oxymoron."