One of my hobbies since buying an 8-core Mac Pro is to actually make use of all of the processing power. So far I haven’t had much success. And, of course, the web and disk are not any faster, so the extra cores don’t do much good in general.
The only app I use that’s really built for that kind of thing is Xcode, which will spawn off separate compiler threads in parallel. However, I wasn’t seeing more the two cores busy when compiling a large project, though Xcode claimed to be working on 8 files at a time. I was thinking that disk or memory constraints were the problem, but it turned out to be a configuration issue.
At some point in the past, I had innocently turned on the Distributed Builds option, which is meant for distributing tasks to other machines on a local network. However, a side effect is that the compiling is throttled, presumably with thread priorities, so the build is more of a background activity. Turning off Distributed Builds gets all 8 local cores working in parallel.
Now I just need to get my own programs to use those cores…
I’m surprised no one has complained about this cover misquote from last week’s Parade Sunday insert. Maybe I’m the only one that actually read the story.