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The multi-cores are coming and software designed for fewer cores usually doesn't work on more cores without substantial redesign. For a taste of the issues take a look at
No new global mutexes! (and how to make the thread/connection pool work), which shows some of the difficulties of making MySQL perform on SMP servers.
In this paper, Richard Smith, a –Staff Engineer at Sun, goes into some nice detail on multi-core issues. His take home lessons are:
Use fine-grained locking or lock-free strategy
Document the strategy, including correctness
criteria (invariants)
Keep critical sections short
Profile the code at both light and heavy load
Collect HW performance counter data
Identify bottleneck resource (there's always at least one!)
Eliminate or ameliorate it
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