SMP behaviour

Pascal A. Dupuis (dupuis@lei.ucl.ac.be)
Thu, 19 Nov 1998 19:44:50 +0100 (CET)

Hello,
I've noticed a strange thing on my new dual PII machine. I had rc5des
client running since a few days, eating 99% of the CPU time. Machine was
responsive, but a bit slow. Today I noticed it was running with the
parameters set on the previous machine, with the number of processors set
to 1. I stopped the client, set the number of processors to autodetect,
restarted it. Now I have two processes eating 99% cpu time of the two
processors.

But now the machine seems to run faster (console switching, file
manipulation, ...) ! Should it be possible that, if the kernel doesn't
consume all the CPU time of one processor, it does not use AT ALL the second ?
Is there another explanation ? (kernel 2.1.129-pre5, dual PII 333 Mhz, 64
Meg ram )

Greetings

Pascal A. Dupuis

-- 
feature, n: A surprising property of a program.  Occasionaly documented.
To call a property a feature sometimes means the author did not consider
that case, and the program makes an unexpected, though not necessarily
wrong response.  See BUG.  "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"  A bug can
be changed to a feature by documenting it.




-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/