[whatwg] [Web workers] An attribute describing the "best" number of worker to invoke in a delegation use case

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 11/12/09 12:49 PM, David Bruant wrote:
> =>  You're perfectly right. I reformulate the definition of "running
> conditions" (appearing in condition 2 and 3) as :
> "same memory available, same number of process running concurrently, no
> other worker running working on the same document".

That doesn't help that much, unfortunately.  Most simply, consider a 
quad-core chip and workers that are completely cpu-bound.  If there are 
no other processes running, the optimal number of workers is 4.  If 
there is one other process which is also completely cpu-bound running, 
the optimal number of workers is 3 (in the sense that 4 may well not 
satisfy your condition 3).  This is really the same issue as having one 
worker running, but it's some process not under the browser's control.

If, on the other hand, the workers are I/O bound (esp. network I/O 
latency bound), then the optimal number of workers can well be larger 
than the number of cores...

-Boris