Re: Informix 5.10

Way back in the mists of time (well, OK, last month), Art S. Kagel wrote: > henryg wrote: >> Can anyone tell me whether Informix 5.10 will benefit (or be able to use) >> multiple CPU's. >> I can't seem to find a Multiprocessor parameter for tbconfig. > > Informix OnLine (OL 4.xx, & 5.xx) is single threaded. The only parallel > processing it is capable of is parallel sorting if the PSORT_NPROCS and > PSORT_DBTEMP environment variables are set then index builds and larger > ORDER BY clauses will be broken into $PSORT_NPROCS streams of data and > an sqlturbo process will be started to sort each stream. Then primary > sqlturbo then merges the sorted streams that result and return the data > to you. > > However, each sqlturbo process is single threaded and except for > parallel sorting each connection gets only one sqlturbo process. For > true parallel query and multithreading you have to upgrade to Informix > Dynamic Server (IDS 7.xx, 9.xx, 10.xx). Of course, OnLine 5.10 can use multiple CPUs - but each separate session is going to get its own sqlturbo process, and each such process can be run in parallel on a multi-CPU machine, so if you have (many) concurrent users, OnLine 5.10 will make use of multiple CPUs. However, as Art indicates, except for the rather specialized cases, a single session will not benefit from multiple CPUs. -- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2005.02 -- http://dbi.perl.org/