On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 17:23, Marc Schwartz wrote:
Linux 2.6 and Hyper-Threading http://www.2cpu.com/articles/ht_linux/
The final paragraph:
"The final word on Linux and hyper-threading? While the majority of benchmarks we've looked at here today have shown improvements, it's still important that you do your own testing with the applications you use on a daily basis. On the surface, HT certainly looks promising but it's clear that there are still situations out there where HT is going to negatively impact the performance of an application. Before rolling out those new workstations or servers, do your own testing in pre-production to find out what hyper-threading can do for you."
Very sensible. For a lot of folks, it makes very little improvement whatsoever. Personally, my most common workload (compiling kernels) wins quite considerably with hyperthreading (last time I measured it took over a minute off the build).
It's worth pointing out that at this point, the scheduler in the 2.6 kernel is still lacking some HT enhancements.
Dave