Article at 2CPU.com - Linux 2.6 and Hyper-Threading

[Dave Jones]

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