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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

> I'd rather not be spamming the running processes list and have to actually handle seperate processes that should be threads.

I may be a bit naive asking this... but why would you care that much?

Looking at activity monitor on my Mac, I count 14 Google Chrome Helper Process instances each spawning upwards of 13 threads. Adobe does something similar, as do several other programs/applications on my machine. Yet, my machine is mostly idle.

I can only speak for myself here. If I want something done on my computer... I don't care if it spams my process list if that is what it takes to complete the task. Don't crash my machine, but do what you have to do to get it done quickly.

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This is a parallel compression application that uses all cores of a system by default. On some systems, it may use 100% HDD, others near 100% CPU. Its meant to take up as much resources as it can unless its core usage is lowered. But, with any program that has a high workload, the potential exists that the programs UI will not respond, or perhaps your desktop won't even allow you to get to the UI to stop the process. This is where task manager saves the day.

Along with that, I like it to be a single process so its easily wrappable in whatever monitoring or process-throttling application you want. I will admit I'm completely assuming that multiple processes is harder than a single process to do that with.

Also, when you get up to the 16 thread count, seeing that many processes pop up at the top of your process list is both annoying and doesn't let you know how much the application overall is using easily. It could also be scary to some users who have never seen that before and think its trying to run a whole bunch of programs.

Yes, some of those are clearly nitpicks and not good technical reasons, but this is a problem that is fixed with a good framework anyways.

A process swap completely wipes the cache. Once swapped in, your process is not up to top speed for a while, until the working set has been copied into cache. You'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. Best case scenario: one process per core.

There's more overhead communicating between processes than there would be if threads were just modifying shared state.

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