Ok there were a few (10) zombie processes from a smaller test that I killed.<br><br>One osmosis writing to 190 files vs 190 gzips writing to one file each: Fortunately the free RAM is now much larger, and Linux can buffer the output for longer, so it can write more after each seek. So it's less seeks.<br>
<br>Linux is quite good at switching between task that communicate by pipes. 12 years ago I did a test and on the same hardware Linux pipes were 5 or 10 times more efficient than Windows messages. With all the multicore and multiprocessor computers on the market I'm sure a lot of work has been done to make it efficient so that Linux developers are encouraged to split processes where possible.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Jochen Topf <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jochen@remote.org">jochen@remote.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 07:26:01PM +0200, Nic Roets wrote:<br>
> The gzip's are mine. They're niced and ioniced, so I hope they did not cause<br>
> any problems.<br>
<br>
</div>They still need memory and its probably really unefficient to run so many<br>
at the same time, because they will continually step on each others toes,<br>
especially when the disk have to seek back and forth between the places<br>
where they are reading and/or writing the data for all those processes.<br>
<br>
Now there is only one gzip but many 惡at愀 running? They don愒 look like<br>
they are connected to anything.<br>
<br>
Jochen<br>
<font color="#888888">--<br>
Jochen Topf <a href="mailto:jochen@remote.org">jochen@remote.org</a> <a href="http://www.remote.org/jochen/" target="_blank">http://www.remote.org/jochen/</a> +49-721-388298<br>
<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>