[M3devel] defaulting to parallel backend?

[Rodney M. Bates]

For systems that have it, how about just using the 'nice' command?

On 07/06/2016 12:44 AM, Jay K wrote:
>   There is no good easy answer here.
>
>
>   You really want everything on the computer to use all of the
>   available resources, to service whatever the human wants done
>   as fast as possible, while remaining responsive e.g. to
>   requests to cancel or requests to increase the work load.
>
>
>   This is largely the job of the kernel, but it is an impossible job.
>
>   To some extent we are obligated to over subscribe, in order
>   to provide the kernel more information.
>   But, again, it is an impossible job.
>
>   Besides it probably being NP complete to complete the submitted work
>   as soon as possible, we also don't know the user's priorities.
>
>   I could propose "pb 1" to mean run single threaded, putting
>   the burden on you to give. But that is a little rude.
>
>   Note that historically you didn't have as much flexibility here -- single core systems.
>
>
>   Anyway, how about the default be half?
>   Or 1 if <= 3 cores available?
>   I seem to have 4 cores, so this will help me.
>
>
>   I understand this is still not great, e.g. if you have 10
>   high priority single processors jobs, and one low priority
>   Modula-3 build, Modula-3 will by default use more than you wish.
>
>   And yes, I understand disk are another resource.
>   And network -- disk can be on network.
>   You want to operate at the "edge of resource exhaustion" in general.
>
>
>   - Jay
>
>
>
>
>  > Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 18:36:45 +0200
>  > From: lemming at henning-thielemann.de
>  > To: rodney.m.bates at acm.org
>  > Subject: Re: [M3devel] defaulting to parallel backend?
>  > CC: m3devel at elegosoft.com
>  >
>  >
>  > On Mon, 4 Jul 2016, Rodney M. Bates wrote:
>  >
>  > > I prefer to use one fewer than the number of processors, so I can
>  > > web browse, read email, review code, etc. while waiting for a
>  > > compile. The compiler can saturate them all, making any other
>  > > stuff very slow.
>  >
>  > Slowdown can happen even earlier if the compilation is bound by disk
>  > access time.
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-- 
Rodney Bates
rodney.m.bates at acm.org