Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:02:26 01/19/06
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On January 19, 2006 at 03:48:34, Tord Romstad wrote: >On January 18, 2006 at 22:26:06, Jay Urbanski wrote: > >>On January 18, 2006 at 17:55:55, Dann Corbit wrote: >> >>>Executables are heavyweight processes that heavily consume resources and threads >>>are lightweight processes which consume less resources. But a threaded server >>>needs any global variables to have write-access gated with a critical section >>>whereas a global in a spawned server has no effect (since each server is a >>>single process running a single thread of execution). >>> >>>It is better, but much harder, to write a threaded chess engine. >> >> >>Very true but with nearly all processor improvements in the immediate future >>coming from more cores/threads - it will likely be worth the effort to bite the >>bullet and learn to write good threaded code at some point. > >Why? Wouldn't a chess engine using multiple processes and >shared memory be just as fast as a similar program with >multiple threads on a computer with several CPUs (or CPUs >with multiple cores)? I thought the engine using processes >would just consume a bit more memory, and not have any >significant disadvantages apart from that. > >I'm not saying that you are wrong, of course. I am totally >ignorant about this subject, and I ask in order to learn more. Process startup time, verses thread startup time can be significant. An executable consumes more computer resources than a thread. It's not a stupendous difference. If you look at the efficiency of Deep Sjeng (which uses processes) it's really not that bad. The place where it would hurt the most is in the extremes (e.g. 8 CPUs with 4 cores each). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computer_science)
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