Val Henson <vhenson@esscom.com> writes:
> I'm under the impression that Mark is talking about context-switch time
> and not about time between switching tasks. Mark, care to clarify?
the cost of switching context is non-zero and it is overhead, i.e.,
not productive. each switch incurs a fixed cost. thus you want to
switch as little possible. note, that when the context switch time is
a small fraction of the total, say under 1%, then it doesn't pay to
reduce it (since you can only reap what it burns and that's under 1%).
> -VAL
>
> On 30 Apr 2000, Johan Kullstam wrote:
>
> > Mark Zealey <kernel@itsolve.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > > I am interested in what the optimum time on an i386+ is for task
> > > switching. I would imagine that it would be quite long, as it must take
> > > lots of cycles to save all the reg's and load the new ones.
> >
> > from a cycle efficiency standpoint, optimum would be to stay
> > infinitely long with each task and only switch when the task was
> > complete or waiting for input. however, user interaction demands
> > switching once in a while to preserve the illusion of multi-tasking.
> >
> > --
> > J o h a n K u l l s t a m
> > [kullstam@ne.mediaone.net]
> > Don't Fear the Penguin!
> >
> > -
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> >
>
>
> -
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-- J o h a n K u l l s t a m [kullstam@ne.mediaone.net] Don't Fear the Penguin!- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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