[scribus] Scribus on 'modern' machines

[Craig Ringer]

Asif Lodhi wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> On 5/2/08, John Beardmore <John at t4sltd.co.uk> wrote:
>> ...  I'm now looking at upgrading to a dual core 2.4GHz machine with 4 gig of
>> faster memory. ...
> 
> Though I don't know how to do it using Linux but, if you're using
> WinXP, you can distribute each process' load equally on ALL the cores
> from the Task Manager (just right click on any process in the task
> manager and you'll see the option) OR you can also allocate processes
> on a per core basis (same option just remove the check from the cores
> that you want to allocate to other tasks than the one you're
> focusing).

There's rarely a reason to bother doing either manually. The OS is 
pretty good about dynamically scheduling things so that a busy process 
gets constant CPU time and other tasks run on the other core. IMO it 
switches processes from core to core a little too freely, but that only 
matters for things that care about cache (and Scribus probably doesn't 
benefit from cache much except maybe during some image operations).

I've never been able to measure a performance difference between letting 
the OS scheduler do its thing and manually locking an app to its own 
private CPU core.

The main reason you might want to lock a process to a core and exclude 
others from using that core is if you're attempting to achieve extremely 
low latencies for things like audio work or other soft real time 
applications.

> Lastly, I'd recommend that you upgrade to Core 2 Due or Quad Core

A quad core processor of a given price will be significantly *slower* in 
per-core performance. Scribus is single threaded, and cannot usefully 
use more than one core. As such, you're much better off getting a dual 
core processor in the same price bracket. Maybye even a single core if 
you could still get them, though with dual core Scribus gets one core to 
its self without competition with OS services etc.

There are things for which a quad core CPU is great, but Scribus is not 
one of them. If you're also doing things that work well in parallel like 
encoding video or using Photoshop on huge images you might benefit from 
more cores.

--
Craig Ringer