In a bold display of creativity, James Gurney wrote:
On 12/7/2004 10:31 PM, Michael Webber wrote:
yes it would give a very big performance boost.
Seriously, you have no idea what you're talking about. Probably best to
quit now while you're ahead.
He's right, Webber. Really, though, you're not the first person to make
that mistake, so don't feel too bad about it. Just have the sense to
drop it and do some research if you believe it's worth even that amount
of effort. Others have had entire matching sets of new assholes torn in
them by EEs and CSs that go into the stratosphere above my head on the
details.
If it helps, think about it this way: SMP is most helpful when you have
a bunch of relatively unrelated computations that need to be done, where
one outcome doesn't really affect another very much. It's not very
helpful when you have to do one computation at a time, because the
result of the first will affect the second and so on. If I've
understood it correctly, it's like having a big box of flash cards with
simple math problems (8+1, 10-7, etc). If you've got 4 people there,
sitting in their chairs, all eager and waiting for you to start flashing
those cards so they can give you an answer, sitting in front of all 4 of
them and showing them one card at a time isn't going to get you an
answer 4 times faster than with just one person. In fact, it's rarely
going to make any positive difference at all. But maybe if you were
instructed to dump the whole box on the floor and have the 4 of them
sort through them and call you when you're done, well, then you might
get significantly faster performance out of having those 4 people there
doing it instead of just one. Game servers in general, and hlds
specifically, are a lot closer to flashing the cards one at a time than
dumping the whole box. "But hey," I hear you say, "y not do it neway,
cuz i no tehre is sum increse, rite?" The problem is that it's not as
simple as dumping the cards out on the floor. You have to be
cross-indexing all the cards, figuring out which ones need to be done at
which point, how it affects the others, making sure nobody accidentally
grabs a card from someone else's pile, etc, etc.
It's more like having 4 people all try to work over the Jenga tower at
the same time in order to get it to the thinnest it can be as fast as
they can without it falling over. It takes a supreme level of
coordination and planning and basically what amounts to a metric fuckton
of work--and sometimes a performance *penalty* for all the extra shit
they're now having to keep track of. When performance increases are
negligible, it just doesn't make sense to go down that road.
--
Eric (the Deacon remix)
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