Disk I/O as a bottleneck?

[is123 at zahav.net.il]

On Sun, 08 May 2011 17:28:07 +0300
Gilboa Davara <gilboad at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 07:31 +0000, is123 at zahav.net.il wrote:
> >
> > at this point Linux (and BSD) still aren't doing SMP
> > as well as other OS
> 
> Care to elaborate?

I think it's well-known Solaris exploits multicore better than Linux or
BSD. I see quite a few problem reports on the various BSD SMP mailing lists.
I don't track Linux very much but I can see from conky on my boxes Linux
just doesn't do that well. And race conditions are unfortunately an
ongoing problem in many apps.

I work on a different platform where multithreading and multiprocessing
were a very early part of the design and I have seen a big difference in
performance and lack of race conditions in that environment because it was
based on a native multithreading model whereas UNIX was based on process
forking and threading came much later and you could argue was not exactly
implemented seamlessly. It's not an apples and apples comparison but the
difference in software issues on those systems is night and day. As far as I
can see those problems still haven't been resolved at the design or
implementation levels.