Jan-Willem Maessen
Absolutely. Good high-level thread support trumps anything provided by the operating system.
Unless you have more than one CPU...
Similar dramatic performance disparities have cropped up in the Java community. There are Java benchmarks which create thousands of threads; most implementations slow to a crawl when this happens, as the operating system collapses under the crushing load.
In particular, Linux will have a problem with thousands of *runnable* processes. There's some potentially nasty O(>n) complexities when processing the run queue, so while a couple of runnable processes is very fast, having lots is not. In practice, most processes are blocked on IO most of the time, so it seems it's only a problem for certain Java benchmarks. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants