The movie hasn't come to Norway yet, and I'm definitely not sure if I'm going to see it when it comes either. (To me, most of it looks like hype. Why? Because every SW I've ever met says `I can't explain what's so great, the SW moves are just the best ever'. Not ONE has given me a good reason, in fact, a SW fan I know says that they aren't good at all, but he still likes them. Yes, I HAVE seen the three `first'.)
I asked a polite question. The least you could have done was to keep silent, understand that not everbody has seen SW 50 times in a row and not come with a (IMHO) worthless posting.
But doesn't this make the code more complicated than it would be if it were multithreaded?
Yes, and that's why almost all server daemons today are multithreaded (often via a fork(), or via inetd). But the complicated code has to be somewhere, remember. With this step, you get much more control about what is executed where, and you can share much more code among the processes. This, combined with a lot of other things, keeps the memory requirements down, for one thing. Instead of a whole new process, you'll need a couple hundred bytes to hold the information.
To sum it up: Yes, the code is getting more complicated, but I think it's worth it. Much of the same framework can be shared between applications, also, so it's not so much work as you'd expect. The only thing that gets slightly more difficult is the command parsing -- if you miss a char, you can't just issue a (blocking) getchar() and wait:-)
Remember that every process (as you referred to, threads are only lightweight processes, also on Linux) takes up additional memory. Less memory for cache, or ultimately more usage of swapfile.
First off, spawning a thread is a very lightweight operation when compared to fork()'ing a child as most web servers do (including apache). And not spawning off a thread is an even more ligthweight operation! I'm not saying that Apache does it right (even Linus has said they don't).
To me, multithreading here just looks like a `buzzword', to explain something more difficult to the end readers.
Please get this right: A well-written, single-threaded function will beat (or equal) an equally well-written, multi-threaded function in _all_ cases, simply because somebody has to do the switch between threads (processes) in all cases. In the multithreaded version, the OS/CPU has to do it. _Multithreading_ _doesn't_ _mean_ _extra_ _speed!_ (That's why I wrote my single-threaded FTP daemon, BetaFTPD (search Freshmeat for it if you're interested). Now, just had to pull the plug for my own (GPL'ed) `product'... Don't make that affect your judgement, please...)
Seriously... This was supposed to be a fair test, and until the RH team that was attending (and configuring the Linux machines for) the test says otherwise, we'll have to accept that.
However, I think a Mindcraft III would fare _much_ better now. The fixes from Mindcraft I didn't come in in time for Mindcraft II (see an older article on Slashdot), and now the RH guys found even more things to fix. In addition, as the article pointed out, Apache is getting better, too. (What about Boa, or any other single-threaded web server, BTW?)
Sorry, folks, this was a fair test, at least when it comes to biasing. However, as I've said, Linux was a bit unlucky with the time and date. (Microsoft, on the other hand, had already made their improvements, based on the data from the previous tests... Guess they've invested a lot of money in fixing it quickly...)
All in all, however, this was a (minor) win for Linux -- the results was nowhere near Mindcraft I, even with Microsoft's new improvements.
I remember a project where a person did a clean install of NT on a totally fresh harddisk, put it in a room by itself, unplugged the keyboard, mouse, network, etc. and did basically NOTHING on it. Guess what? It crashed after 53 days (or something around that). As long as you don't use an unstable kernel driver, and don't do everything as root (as some people appear to do, I must admit I do it myself...), Linux is dead stable. At least it won't crash doing nothing!
Slashdot talked about `MindCraft II' (the re-run of the test) some time ago. You could always search for it. Red Hat sent three kernel hackers, Microsoft sent three marketing people:-) Of course, it was during the first day that the director at MindCraft came with the immortal quote (when one of the Red Hat people questioned the Microsoft sponsorship): "You're challenging my integrity."
Well, I guess they've received a _lot_ of constructive criticism, but of course, they're picking the 10 worst they've received. Was that a big surprise?
Yes, those people should be ashamed (now _please_, DON'T show that you're just as bad and flame back at them!!), but Mindcraft should too.
/* Steinar */
Re:Microsoft will be seen in a positive light?...
on
Salon on Mindcraft II
·
· Score: 2
I wonder who those (RH) people are. From the article, it sounds like they know their stuff, but obviously, people from the Samba and Apache teams would be the best.
Let us all wish them good luck now, should we? It's a little suspicious that MS/MindCraft was so interested in re-running the test. Perhaps they've got something nasty for us...
Most of the mp3s that I have come from my own cd collection.
Come on, it's not the format (MP3) I'm after, I'm after the abuse of it. I know people who have 40 CDs of the same artist, and can't get the last 2 or 3, so they get an MP3 instead. Come on, it's not _that_ I'm after. What I'm trying to stand up against, is people who simply don't buy CDs anymore, because getting an MP3 is cheaper.
Doesn't surprise me much -- I see a real lot of crazy attitudes towards copyright violation, especially with MP3 (`MP3 is the best thing that has ever happened record industries', `It's not illegal if you delete it after 24 hours', etc.) Sadly, many of them appear on Slashdot.
Whatever Stallman may have said, it's no excuse, people. Yes, I agree, everything could have been a lot cheaper, but there's still no excuse. I know all the arguments `pirates' (excuse the term) use (I'm an ex-`pirate' myself), and I know how silly they all are. And the absolutely most stupid thing I can ever think of is people who determine your `coolness' by the amount of `WaReZ' or MP3 you have. Come on, get lost. Or even: Grow up.
I know I'm pissing off a lot of people here, but I don't care. Face reality.
The Pentium was made for general-purpose stuff (including games) _and_ FPU-intensive stuff. The Pentium FPU is pipelined, the K6' FPU is not. No matter how good a coder you are, you can get about 2x the FPU performance of a Pentium vs. the K6, with both CPUs running properly optimized code (for themselves). (The K6 can issue a FPU instruction about every 2 cycles, the Pentium can do one every cycle, if you pipeline correctly.)
Besides, the 3DNow! instructions are single precision, which limits their use somewhat. (They aren't SIMD either, BTW.)
Are you talking about AMDs 3DNow! technology, or what?
The AMD K6 (at least the ones without 3DNow!) was never designed to be a games machine. In fact, getting a Pentium of a _lower_ chip speed will often help you. But of course, other things (remember the K6 series has been optimized for business applications, just like the Cyrixes) will be slower. Perhaps it's time for a little system upgrade after all:-) Of course, it all depends on your own system, and the money you've got. If you want to be a serious gamer, you _do_ have to pay a bit. That's life...
Thanks... For once, BabelFish didn't manage to get a clean translation (usually, it makes it readable, but not good). Even _I_ (with my tiny bit of school German) found the German version easier to read than the BabelFish `english' one. But of course, your translation was more than good enough.
I have no problems with my HP Travan 4/8GB (internal) drive... Doing monthly full backup (of 2+4+2+0.5GB), and nightly incremental backup. I just don't see your point.
If you mean Free Speech (Software) => Free Beer, I can understand it. But the equality sign goes both ways, and IMO, `Free Beer => Free Software' is wrong. I think much trouble could be saved if the English language was a little different...
For your other arguments, I agree. Showing the source does not mean it's free, but it's an important part of freeing software. Perhaps we should get a clear definition of `open source' (even though it's trademarked), and understand that `open source' does not always mean `free' (speech).
Hmmm... _That_ is an interesting viewpoint. You may well be right -- without all-new games pushing the limits all the time, perhaps we wouldn't be where we are today.
From my viewpoint, open-sourcing something is the exact opposite of forcing you to use proprietary tools. Look at ICQ for instance -- it hasn't even been open-sourced by Mirabilis, yet we have several good ICQ clones. If/when Macromedia releases the source to their player _and_ their file format, I guess several good `clone' editors will pop up. I'm not saying that I'm for Flash at all (I've never even used it), but open-sourcing is seldom a bad thing. Perhaps they're forced, but releasing the source to their player can't be all that bad.
Slashdot Mirror
The movie hasn't come to Norway yet, and I'm definitely not sure if I'm going to see it when it comes either. (To me, most of it looks like hype. Why? Because every SW I've ever met says `I can't explain what's so great, the SW moves are just the best ever'. Not ONE has given me a good reason, in fact, a SW fan I know says that they aren't good at all, but he still likes them. Yes, I HAVE seen the three `first'.)
Give me a good reason, and I'll consider it.
/* Steinar */
Hello!?
I asked a polite question. The least you could have done was to keep silent, understand that not everbody has seen SW 50 times in a row and not come with a (IMHO) worthless posting.
/* Steinar */
Excuse my ignorance, but what, who or where is Jar Jar?
I'm sorry for not being a SW fan, but it looks like everybody talks about him/her/it, so I felt I finally had to ask.
/* Steinar */
But doesn't this make the code more complicated than it would be if it were multithreaded?
:-)
Yes, and that's why almost all server daemons today are multithreaded (often via a fork(), or via inetd). But the complicated code has to be somewhere, remember. With this step, you get much more control about what is executed where, and you can share much more code among the processes. This, combined with a lot of other things, keeps the memory requirements down, for one thing. Instead of a whole new process, you'll need a couple hundred bytes to hold the information.
To sum it up: Yes, the code is getting more complicated, but I think it's worth it. Much of the same framework can be shared between applications, also, so it's not so much work as you'd expect. The only thing that gets slightly more difficult is the command parsing -- if you miss a char, you can't just issue a (blocking) getchar() and wait
/* Steinar */
Remember that every process (as you referred to, threads are only lightweight processes, also on Linux) takes up additional memory. Less memory for cache, or ultimately more usage of swapfile.
/* Steinar */
First off, spawning a thread is a very lightweight operation when compared to fork()'ing a child as most web servers do (including apache).
And not spawning off a thread is an even more ligthweight operation! I'm not saying that Apache does it right (even Linus has said they don't).
/* Steinar */
Yes, of course, but as far as I understood the article, this was true for the uni-CPU version, too.
BTW, isn't 4 Ethernet cards a bit unrealistic? Wouldn't a single gigabit card be much better?
/* Steinar */
-> Process A requests a read() from hard drive 1. The kernel blocks A and begins handling the read.
Well, you see, Linux and all other Unixes have a non-blocking flag on every file descriptor... It's called FIONBIO.
/* Steinar */
To me, multithreading here just looks like a `buzzword', to explain something more difficult to the end readers.
:-)
Please get this right: A well-written, single-threaded function will beat (or equal) an equally well-written, multi-threaded function in _all_ cases, simply because somebody has to do the switch between threads (processes) in all cases. In the multithreaded version, the OS/CPU has to do it. _Multithreading_ _doesn't_ _mean_ _extra_ _speed!_ (That's why I wrote my single-threaded FTP daemon, BetaFTPD (search Freshmeat for it if you're interested). Now, just had to pull the plug for my own (GPL'ed) `product'... Don't make that affect your judgement, please...)
Now, got it right?
/* Steinar */
Seriously... This was supposed to be a fair test, and until the RH team that was attending (and configuring the Linux machines for) the test says otherwise, we'll have to accept that.
However, I think a Mindcraft III would fare _much_ better now. The fixes from Mindcraft I didn't come in in time for Mindcraft II (see an older article on Slashdot), and now the RH guys found even more things to fix. In addition, as the article pointed out, Apache is getting better, too. (What about Boa, or any other single-threaded web server, BTW?)
Sorry, folks, this was a fair test, at least when it comes to biasing. However, as I've said, Linux was a bit unlucky with the time and date. (Microsoft, on the other hand, had already made their improvements, based on the data from the previous tests... Guess they've invested a lot of money in fixing it quickly...)
All in all, however, this was a (minor) win for Linux -- the results was nowhere near Mindcraft I, even with Microsoft's new improvements.
/* Steinar */
I remember a project where a person did a clean install of NT on a totally fresh harddisk, put it in a room by itself, unplugged the keyboard, mouse, network, etc. and did basically NOTHING on it. Guess what? It crashed after 53 days (or something around that). As long as you don't use an unstable kernel driver, and don't do everything as root (as some people appear to do, I must admit I do it myself...), Linux is dead stable. At least it won't crash doing nothing!
/* Steinar */
Another place where this is quite common, is religion. People judge religions based on their believers, which can be quite distressing...
:-) (Or perhaps it's just money that plays God here.)
Well, OSes are getting more and more like religions anyway
/* Steinar */
Slashdot talked about `MindCraft II' (the re-run of the test) some time ago. You could always search for it. Red Hat sent three kernel hackers, Microsoft sent three marketing people :-) Of course, it was during the first day that the director at MindCraft came with the immortal quote (when one of the Red Hat people questioned the Microsoft sponsorship): "You're challenging my integrity."
I guess that quote says it all...
/* Steinar */
Well, I guess they've received a _lot_ of constructive criticism, but of course, they're picking the 10 worst they've received. Was that a big surprise?
Yes, those people should be ashamed (now _please_, DON'T show that you're just as bad and flame back at them!!), but Mindcraft should too.
/* Steinar */
I wonder who those (RH) people are. From the article, it sounds like they know their stuff, but obviously, people from the Samba and Apache teams would be the best.
Let us all wish them good luck now, should we? It's a little suspicious that MS/MindCraft was so interested in re-running the test. Perhaps they've got something nasty for us...
/* Steinar */
Most of the mp3s that I have come from my own cd collection.
Come on, it's not the format (MP3) I'm after, I'm after the abuse of it. I know people who have 40 CDs of the same artist, and can't get the last 2 or 3, so they get an MP3 instead. Come on, it's not _that_ I'm after. What I'm trying to stand up against, is people who simply don't buy CDs anymore, because getting an MP3 is cheaper.
/* Steinar */
Doesn't surprise me much -- I see a real lot of crazy attitudes towards copyright violation, especially with MP3 (`MP3 is the best thing that has ever happened record industries', `It's not illegal if you delete it after 24 hours', etc.) Sadly, many of them appear on Slashdot.
Whatever Stallman may have said, it's no excuse, people. Yes, I agree, everything could have been a lot cheaper, but there's still no excuse. I know all the arguments `pirates' (excuse the term) use (I'm an ex-`pirate' myself), and I know how silly they all are. And the absolutely most stupid thing I can ever think of is people who determine your `coolness' by the amount of `WaReZ' or MP3 you have. Come on, get lost. Or even: Grow up.
I know I'm pissing off a lot of people here, but I don't care. Face reality.
/* Steinar */
The Pentium was made for general-purpose stuff (including games) _and_ FPU-intensive stuff. The Pentium FPU is pipelined, the K6' FPU is not. No matter how good a coder you are, you can get about 2x the FPU performance of a Pentium vs. the K6, with both CPUs running properly optimized code (for themselves). (The K6 can issue a FPU instruction about every 2 cycles, the Pentium can do one every cycle, if you pipeline correctly.)
Besides, the 3DNow! instructions are single precision, which limits their use somewhat. (They aren't SIMD either, BTW.)
/* Steinar */
Are you talking about AMDs 3DNow! technology, or what?
:-) Of course, it all depends on your own system, and the money you've got. If you want to be a serious gamer, you _do_ have to pay a bit. That's life...
The AMD K6 (at least the ones without 3DNow!) was never designed to be a games machine. In fact, getting a Pentium of a _lower_ chip speed will often help you. But of course, other things (remember the K6 series has been optimized for business applications, just like the Cyrixes) will be slower. Perhaps it's time for a little system upgrade after all
/* Steinar */
Thanks... For once, BabelFish didn't manage to get a clean translation (usually, it makes it readable, but not good). Even _I_ (with my tiny bit of school German) found the German version easier to read than the BabelFish `english' one. But of course, your translation was more than good enough.
/* Steinar */
I have no problems with my HP Travan 4/8GB (internal) drive... Doing monthly full backup (of 2+4+2+0.5GB), and nightly incremental backup. I just don't see your point.
/* Steinar */
If you mean Free Speech (Software) => Free Beer, I can understand it. But the equality sign goes both ways, and IMO, `Free Beer => Free Software' is wrong. I think much trouble could be saved if the English language was a little different...
For your other arguments, I agree. Showing the source does not mean it's free, but it's an important part of freeing software. Perhaps we should get a clear definition of `open source' (even though it's trademarked), and understand that `open source' does not always mean `free' (speech).
/* Steinar */
Hmmm... _That_ is an interesting viewpoint. You may well be right -- without all-new games pushing the limits all the time, perhaps we wouldn't be where we are today.
/* Steinar */
From my viewpoint, open-sourcing something is the exact opposite of forcing you to use proprietary tools. Look at ICQ for instance -- it hasn't even been open-sourced by Mirabilis, yet we have several good ICQ clones. If/when Macromedia releases the source to their player _and_ their file format, I guess several good `clone' editors will pop up. I'm not saying that I'm for Flash at all (I've never even used it), but open-sourcing is seldom a bad thing. Perhaps they're forced, but releasing the source to their player can't be all that bad.
/* Steinar */
You're missing a http://. Sorry, I don't mean being picky, but the error page I got said I should nag you :-)
/* Steinar */