Re: [coreutils] Memory usage of parallel sort

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 17/12/10 19:29, Assaf Gordon wrote:
...
> Thanks for looking at this!
>
> I've not looked into the memory details,
> but this is another reason to restrict
> the default number of threads to 8,
> which we talked about previously...
>
> commit 69ef9deef087b0447c022225d9a29825d7a714a1
> Author: Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>
> Date:   Sat Dec 18 05:27:46 2010 +0000
>
>     sort: use at most 8 threads by default
>
>     * src/sort.c (main): If --parallel isn't specified,
>     restrict the number of threads to 8 by default.
>     If the --parallel option is specified, then
>     allow any number of threads to be set, independent
>     of the number of processors on the system.
>
> diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
> index 484ed5c..7eda1b2 100644
> --- a/NEWS
> +++ b/NEWS
> @@ -27,6 +27,12 @@ GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- 
> outline -*-
>
>    sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are 
> limited.
>
> +** Changes in behavior
> +
> +  sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
> +  performance gains.  Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
> +  to the number of available processors.

That change looks fine.  Please push it.
I'm glad you are mentioning how --parallel is no longer restricted.