Re: [PATCH] sort: Add --threads option, which parallelizes internal sort.

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:

> More important, it's not clear to me what the role of the test suite
> ought to be.  Should the test really fail if it doesn't get enough
> performance improvement with 2 threads?  How do we decide what's
> "enough"?  None of our other tests are performance tests so we are in a
> bit of a new ground here.

I don't have a resolution to this puzzle, but I think we should
probably try to avoid generating test failures on single-core machines
(where, I assume, there is limited benefit from increasing the number
of threads).  While modern CPUs are generally multi-core, there is
nothing to stop processes being bound to a subset of cores (or indeed,
coreutils being built in a VM which is only allowed to use one core).

James.