Setting thread/process affinity

In some instances you can get better performance, or reproducibility, by restricting the processors that a thread runs on. Linux has pthread_set_affinity_np (the 'np' tag means non-portable). On Solaris you have a number of nearly equivalent options:

• Processor sets where you create a set of processors and allow only particular processes to run on this set.
• Processor_bind, where you bind a particular process or thread to a particular virtual CPU. The thread cannot migrate off this CPU, but other threads can run on it. This means that you need to coordinate between different processes to ensure that they are not all allocated to the same CPU.
• Locality groups. On a NUMA system, a locality group is a set of CPUs which share the same memory local memory. Processes that remain executing on processors within their locality group will continue to get low memory access times, if they get scheduled to processors outside the group their memory access times may increase.