Okay. Anyway, the semaphores are apparently used for purposes other than
TAS. That can be made faster too, on platforms which support POSIX
mutexes (shared between processes).
"Robert E. Bruccoleri" wrote:
>
> Dear Igor,
>
> > I am confused to hell. I always thought MIPS does NOT have TAS
> > instruction ;)
>
> On the SGI platform, there are very high speed implementations of test
> and set which allow large number of processes to safely and quickly
> access shared memory. SGI has a hardware team that specifies MIPS
> processor variants that are used in their servers so the machines can
> scale.
>
> I've tried to get SGI interested in putting some internal engineering
> effort to improve PostgreSQL performance on operations which could
> benefit from its shared memory parallel architecture (like index
> creation and sorting), but without success.
>
> +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
> | Robert E. Bruccoleri, Ph.D. | email: bruc@acm.org |
> | P.O. Box 314 | URL: http://www.congen.com/~bruc |
> | Pennington, NJ 08534 | |
> +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
