performance - some details (and shellsort)

[Norman Hendrich]

Hello Tom,

> Norman> I don't have any idea what the mysterious second thread does,
> Norman> except spending CPU cycles.
> 
> The main thread sits and waits for all non-daemon threads to exit.
> The actual work of the Java program is done in the second thread (and
> subsequent threads).

I just tried building gcc/libgcj on a fresh installed SuSE Linux 6.2
system. This time it worked without problems: a simple configure, make,
install, and everything done.

On the SuSE system, the main thread shows up in ps/top, but it doesn't
consume CPU cycles. Everything OK now! Hotspot is still faster, though...


> For the POSIX thread implementation the waiting is done via a
> condition variable.  This shouldn't cause busy-waiting, but maybe it
> does on Linux.  I haven't looked.

It seems that the libpthread I have at home is broken. Thanks again
for your answer!

- Norman