On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 23:20 Europe/Paris, Chris Hecker wrote:

> However, HT changes the cost/benefit equation.  How much remains to be 
> seen, of course.

Do you really think so ?  In my experience, 95% of the costs of threads
(with shared memory) are in the debugging (of the threads 
implementation,
AND of the programs).  Cheap SMP machines and HT do not change the
cost/benefit equation very much.

More important, you don't need threads and shared memory to make use
of a SMP machine.  Any kind of parallelism will do.  Several processes
with message-passing can easily get you 100% load on all your 
processors.
Also, message-passing is more general; for example it will work on 
clusters.

So my opinion is: multiprocessing good, threads bad.

-- Damien

-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners