[webkit-dev] support for navigator.cores or navigator.hardwareConcurrency

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On May 5, 2014, at 6:13 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Do you really want a page to know that you have a  fancy-pants 24-core
>>>> Mac Pro rather than a little Mac mini?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes!
>>> If I have 24 cores ready to do work and the page can put them to use, I
>>> would like it to do so.
>>> At the same time, if I just have a old mac mini, I don't want the page
>>> to launch 24 workers as that will exhaust my memory and cause contention.
>>>
>>>
>>> But I don't have 24 cores available, i have 24 cores installed.  You
>>> have no idea what the actual workload of the system is, you don't know
>>> whether any other tabs are also using workers, you only have one piece of
>>> information, and that is nowhere near sufficient to make a reasonable
>>> choice.
>>>
>>
>> Sure, if I have 2 tabs and each one consumes all my CPU resources, things
>> will run at half the speed and maybe even worse because of we would use
>> more memory.
>>
>
> At most at half the speed; it could be significantly worse if each worker
> ended up accessing completely different parts of RAM, etc...
>
> Furthermore, the performance characteristics of 4 physical cores with SMT
> enabled for the total of 8 logical cores is substantially different from
> that of a system with 4 physical cores without SMT (4 logical) or 8
> physical cores without SMT (8 logical).  In some cases, distributing work
> among 8 threads concurrently in such a system (4 physical cores with SMT)
> results in a much worse performance than doing so among 4 threads.
>
> So while I agree that providing some API to let developers know of the
> number of threads that could be ran concurrently
>

is useful


> , I'm not certain the number of installed cores is a good metrics for that.
>
> - R. Niwa
>
>
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