radical suggestion for fc4 release

[Darren Steven]

Paul Iadonisi wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 15:15 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>  
>
>>>Processors are not speeding up at all, to a first approximation.
>>>Haven't you noticed?  Moore's law stopped operating about two years ago.
>>>      
>>>
>>Pedantry...
>>
>>Yes, speed increases in single processors have stalled.  Which is why
>>there are a lot more SMP and multicore systems deployed now.  Clocks
>>per dollar seems to be continuing to rise on a roughly 2^n curve, even
>>though clocks per processor aren't.
>>    
>>
>
>  But...
>
>  Unless rpm and yum are multi-threaded, this makes little difference.
>Are they?  Seth?  Jeff?
>
>
>  
>
Hi,

Just , FYI,

yum, being python based might have issues with multi threaded operation. 
>From what I have seen in my zope digging is that python has a thing 
called the GIL (or similar?), that for most applications prevents 
efficient use of SMP. For a while, SMP could make things slower, but I 
believe now that threaded python apps behave OK on most SMP platforms. 
According to the info, a complete re-hash of the python interpreter 
would be required to give it the ability to scale well using threads on 
SMP architectures. Most folk seem to recommend using a multi process 
model for python to exploit SMP.

Regards,

Darren Steven