Very Computer

Will adding the second processor speed up my Linux installation? In case it
will what shal I change in the existing installation to make it happen?

add smp support to your kernel.

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 10:54am  up  4:45,  1 user,  load average: 0.79, 0.61, 0.45

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| Will adding the second processor speed up my Linux installation? In
case it
| will what shal I change in the existing installation to make it happen?
|

|
|

Whether it speeds up your system depends on why your installation is not
fast enough with one processor. For example, if you are out of memory,
or IO-limited, it will not help at all and just might slow you down a
little. If you have a single process that consumes the entire CPU you
have, that process will run only very slightly faster with two CPUs.

Where you do get a performance is when your machine is compute-limited
and you are running more than one compute-limited program at the same
time. Then two processors will make them run almost twice as fast.

So before you bother with two CPUs, measure your present system to see
why it is slow. If you are spending all your time paging, for example,
more CPUs will not help.

As far as changing your installation, you will need a mother board that
will accept multiple CPUs, and you will need to run an SMP kernel.

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~  .~.  Jean-David Beyer           Registered Linux User 85642.
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... it all depends on what you plan to do with this system.
can you elaborate on the intents?

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For example, I found on my previous system, having 2 procesors greatly
speeded up the system because X needed a fair bit of CPU time. If you
are doing things that require a lot of X activity *and* use a lot of CPU
time, you might just find that having 2 CPUs give you better processing
throughput.

Fest3er

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|>
|>
|>>Will adding the second processor speed up my Linux installation? In case
|>>it will what shal I change in the existing installation to make it
|>>happen?
|>
|
| For example, I found on my previous system, having 2 procesors greatly
| speeded up the system because X needed a fair bit of CPU time. If you
| are doing things that require a lot of X activity *and* use a lot of CPU
| time, you might just find that having 2 CPUs give you better processing
| throughput.
|
| Fest3er

I have two 550MHz Pentium IIIs, but I find that X runs at about 1.6% of
one CPU time most of the time. If I am not doing anything but running
xosview, top, and an idle xterm flashing the cursor, it can drop to
something like 0.4% of a CPU. It used to use more (30% of a CPU), once
in a while, when I was running a 2.2 kernel, but with the 2.4 kernels,
it does not do this anymore. So to get a lot of CPU time devoted to X,
you would probably need a pretty slow CPU, and I do not know if you
could find a mother board that would take such slow CPUs.

- --
~  .~.  Jean-David Beyer           Registered Linux User 85642.
~  /V\                             Registered Machine    73926.
~ /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey     http://counter.li.org
~ ^^-^^ 10:15pm up 9 days, 4:22, 2 users, load average: 2.11, 2.12, 2.09
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