yet another question.

[Kenia]

Again I'm a bit unsure, I moved everything to a new (my old) pc, and everything works perfectly, but I wondered if if ShowEQ takes advantage of a dual cpu setup.

My curent config is 2x500 p3, 512 mb memory, its not that it runs slow, just im wondering :)

Or have i totaly missunderstood the concept of dual cpu's and don't have to worry the slightest, as linux will take care of this for me etc.. ?

/Kenia

[fryfrog]

assuming you are using an smp kernel, the way linux works should pretty much take care of everything. you may not notice a huge diff just running ONE instance of showeq (though i believe parts of it ARE multi-threaded) but it will start to make a bigger and bigger differeance as you do more than one thing at once...

like, compile seq (with just make, not make -j3), run 2 or 4 seq sessions or just run other programs at once. one cpu can take the crap you throw at it, and the other will eat what ever the first can't handle... or it will spread it evenly between the two...

but what you end up with is what i have heard called "the creamy smoothness of smp" by 2cpu.com and one or two other places. and i totally agree with that phrase :)

so just be sure that smp is enabled in your kernel. if you are using an rpm based distro, usually you will find a "-smp" somewhere in the kernel's rpm name :)

[Kenia]

im fairly sure that my kernal is smp enable, since i compiled it myself, just i as a little in doubt if programs should be written specifikly to take advantage of it too.. )

[fryfrog]

yes, like windows a program would need to have more than one thread to take advantage of smp. fortunatly, linux developers are not just programming for the single cpu audience (like windows developers) and tend to include multi-threading just because.

you can use top or gtop (and turn on gtop's "smp support" so you can see the usage on EACH cpu individually) to see how well the system is balancing the load.

you can also play with "time make" when compiling showeq, and see just how much time "make -j3" saves you (usually very close to half the time a normal "make" takes).