On Wednesday 01 September 2004 12:29 pm, John McBride wrote: > Matthias Bauw wrote: > >hi, > > > >I was in fact wondering how to get the most out of my P4 3.0Ghz with > >Hyper Threading. > > Watch out that the intel marketing monster doesn't kick you in the > shorts. You still have only one CPU. Turning virtual CPUs on in our > dual P4 boxes ("four" CPUs) severely degraded the box performance. In > many cases all turning on virtual CPUs does is make linux, under > certain loads, to think "hey, I can shuffle things off to another > CPU"--false in this case (it's the same CPU) and there is overhead to > swapping processes between CPUs, thus yielding "less than 0" > performance increase. Was this with a 2.6.x kernel? I've read that the behavior you described was true with 2.4.x, which didn't distinguished between physical and virtual CPUs. Supposedly the 2.6 series of kernels is smarter about this.