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The cost of context switching

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If you think context switching activities is cheap, then just try saying two sentences; and then try interleaving those two sentences.  For example, I can say "I like kites" and "puppies are cute" in under 2 seconds. But to interleave them ("I puppies like are kites cute") took me about 10 seconds.

This is obviously a silly example, but it may be a helpful way to explain to some people why you don't want to be interupted in the middle of an intense thought-process to go handle some other random unrelated task.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2006
    This is a big issue, but how can i show to my boss HOW many time we are wasting on the context switching? I understand that this time rely on machine, OS, memory, skills of sysadmin, but still, is context switching have "Price"?
  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2006
    Boris, great question. Context switching will ultimately cost time. I'm not sure of a good way to measure that though. Hop on over to Rico's blog at: blogs.msdn.com/ricom. Rico know's performance and will certainly give better advice than me here.