On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 09:11:10AM -0700, Russ Cox wrote: > > Can you give one example of a slow task that you think cannot benefit much > > from parallel processing? > > Rebuilding a venti index is almost entirely I/O bound.
Perhaps I should have specified a processor-bound task. I don't know much about venti or its indexes, but "rebuilding" an index sounds like a bad idea anyway. I suppose you could make an index that updates progressively? or does this happen in the event of a crash or something? If someone wants to use a massively parallel computer for IO-bound tasks, they should have massively parallel IO and media to go with it. Sam