On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 14:45 -0600, Brian Hurt wrote:

> One comment I will make is that a mutex is expensive, but not *that* 
> expensive.  I just wrote a quick program (available if anyone cares) in 
> GNU C that measures the cost, in clocks, of locking and unlocking a posix 
> mutex.  On my desktop box (AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz), I'm getting a cost 
> of like 44 clock cycles.  Which makes it less expensive than an L2 cache 
> miss.

Ahem. Now try that on an AMDx2 (dual core). The cost goes through
the roof if one process has a thread on each core. Because each
core has its own cache and both caches have to be flushed/
synchronised. And those caches are BIG!

I had hoped to compare dual CPU with dual core by buying a 
two CPU box (i.e. with two dual cores on it) but they're 2-3
times more expensive because it seems there's no board that
supports Athlons (you need Opterons which cost a lot more).

I have no idea if Linux, for example, running SMP kernel,
is smart enough to know if a mutex is shared between two
processing units or not: AFAIK Linux doesn't support
interprocess mutex. Windows does. Be interesting to
compare.

As mentioned before the only data I have at the moment
is a two thread counter increment experiment on a dual
CPU G5 box, where the speed up from 2 CPUs vs 1 was
a factor of 15 .. times SLOWER.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Async PL, Realtime software consultants
Checkout Felix: http://felix.sourceforge.net