Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
the "6" value is at preferences advances misc. it's now called max number of waiting worker processes. below that is a tick box option to match processes to cores.
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My feeling (I haven't verified any of this so I can't call it an understanding) is that if you are doing CPU-intensive things like conversions, you want to check that box. Having extra processes waiting for the CPU simply slows things down even more. Thinking of how O/S schedulers I have built behave, I would consider setting the number to 1 more than the number of cores so that I/O time can be soaked up by a waiting process.
If you are doing network-intensive things like news and metadata downloads, then you do not want to check the box. Each process can get as much CPU as it wants. Of course, it can't get as much network bandwidth as it wants. My experience has been that for most people, the bandwidth issues are not on the local end, so it makes sense to have multiple clients. (Multi-channel downloaders depend on this phenomenon.)
My guess is that adding books falls into yet another category. It would be I/O-bound, not CPU bound. However, running lots of I/O-bound processes has its own drawbacks, including failed seek optimizations and thrashing though disk caches. I would probably use a number lower than my number of cores.