use Perl

• multiple processes can be better or worse (Score:3, Informative)

  by jmm (276)

  Yep.

  Sometime multiple processes can get more done - for example, if a single process spends a large portion of its time waiting for external events then multiple processes can run at the same time without slowing each other down.

  However, if the processes all compete for the same resource (i.e. they are CPU-bound, or they spend all of their time reading from different parts of the same disk) then they can interfere proportionally and take n times longer.

  Finally, if their competition for the same resource
  • Re:multiple processes can be better or worse (Score:2, Informative)

    by iburrell (4155) <ianburrellNO@SPAMgmail.com> on 2003.12.05 15:23 (#26327) Homepage Journal

    Another factor can be caching. If the processes are I/O bound but are accessing the same data, then they can benefit from caching. The first process to access the data loads it into memory and the other ones don't have to read it from disk.

    This happens with databases where the same data and same queries are run.

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