In article <4654FACE.8070602@Worldnet.att.net>, "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> writes:
Richard wrote:
You should be able to set the processor affinity for FractInt for Windows using that utility. A command-line option can be added to do this without the utility if there is consensus that this is valuable.
I would think that any program written these days, or any that are being re-written, should take full advantage of multi-processors/multi-cores.
Processor affinity and taking advantage of multi-processors/multi-cores are two different things. Processor affinity is a Windows concept that associates your process with a particular core. See <http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686223.aspx> It actually *restricts* the use of multiple cores, not enhances it. When you set the processor affinity on a process you are saying it won't run on the other processors, even if they are idle. If FractInt were *only* a program that ran on Windows, it would be easier to add threading to it (assuming of course, that the UI and calculation code are separated, which they currently are not). Since FractInt also compiles on linux, you have to use a threading approach that is portable between linux and Windows if you want to add threading to the code. This is not as easy as it sounds. If I were to add this now, I would probably use Boost threads. See <http://www.boost.org> -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>