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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On Thu, 4 Jul 1996 bmeyer@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au wrote:

> les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> 
> >Who runs a single process at a time on unix machines?  
> 
> Most single users. But then, most of them don't run SMP machines, either...
> I just had a similar discussion with some Amiga advocate who sang the praise
> of SMP --- for the _home_ user, it is basically pointless.

Actually, under UNIX, processes are so cheap that applications are
frequently composed of multiple processes.  In some cases, it's easer to
fork() and use a pipe or socket than it is to manage a threads.  The side
effect is that it's really easy to throw together "quick and dirty"
applications built from little building blocks.  You can do amazing things
with something as simple as PERL and GPLOT (want to track an entire
industry of the market in real time?).  Because of the modular design,
it is not necessary to relink the application to modify it.

> >And how many people
> >run programs that aren't i/o bound most of the time anyway?
> 
> *Raises hand* That's me. Numerical analysis, slowly converging image
> compression algorithms, MPEG audio encoding.... It's a scary feeling
> when you think "well, the bottleneck is definitely the CPU" on a 
> Pentium 166 :-)
> 
> Bernie "looking for a nice cheap 21164-300" Meyer
> -- 
> ==============================================================================
> Still thinking the Scots should have gone through to the quarterfinals.....
> 
> 


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Fri Jul  5 21:29:13 1996
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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.advocacy