> On 29 Sep 2016, at 10:05, Gerriet M. Denkmann <g...@mdenkmann.de> wrote: > > >> On 29 Sep 2016, at 14:38, Quincey Morris >> <quinceymor...@rivergatesoftware.com> wrote: >> >> On Sep 29, 2016, at 00:15 , Gerriet M. Denkmann <g...@mdenkmann.de> wrote: >>> >>> dispatch_apply( nbrOfThreads, queue, ^void(size_t idx) >>> >>> As my computer has just 8 CPUs, I thought that using nbrOfThreads > 8 would >>> be silly: adding overhead without gaining anything. >>> >>> Turns out this is quite wrong. One function (called threadHappyFunction) >>> works more than 10 times faster using nbrOfThreads = a few ten-thousand (as >>> compared to nbrOfThreads = 8). >>> >>> This is nice, but I would like to know why can this happen. >> >> What makes you think “nbrOfThreads” represents a number of threads? > > Well, nothing. Just let’s call it nbrOfBlocksToBeUsedByDispatchApply, or > whatever. But ultimately any of these things has to run on a CPU, of which > there are no more than 8.
There are mored shared resources than just execution units in your system (e.g. memory bandwidth, or for non-linear accesses latency). Maybe one of your blocks is bandwidth bound, while the other is compute bound? Your second function might be memory bound (with lots of read-modify-write traffic). There are many other factors (and the dispatch_apply man-page tells you that number of invocations is very dependant on your block), such as caches or hyper-threading. The performance counters in Instruments may be able to guide you. Daniel. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com