Ubuntu Lucid Sleep

I like my fresh installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx very much, I think the guys at Canonical are doing a wonderful job with Linux. I had a small problem with suspend to sleep/hibernate, the computer would simulate a sleep, even the monitor would close for a second but continued to stay running.
After a Google search I found this page that made me try adding the file:
/etc/pm/config.d/unload_module with SUSPEND_MODULES="xhci" in it. And I'm happy to report that solves the suspend problem, now I can leave my box running, actually sleeping, during the night and continue my work on Zorba the following morning.
Also if you're interested in adding applications to your Ubuntu Lucid take a look at this wiki page.

i7 vs core2 quad

The title is not really correct it's not a comparison between two processors it's actually just a simple compilation test on two different boxes: one that was almost top of the line 2 years ago, and one that is the same today.

The test is simple: time the compilation of Zorba XQuery project on those boxes.
I used Zorba's svn revision 8144. Zorba is an XQuery processor that I've been working on lately.

The two boxes:
1. Core2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM DDR2 1000Mhz, files on HDD
2. i7-980x 3.33GHz(6 core, 32nm), 6GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz, files on SSD
both running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

On box 1 Core2 Quad:

• single thread make:

real 9m44.595s
user 9m 3.954s
sys 0m37.754s

• 4 threads make:

real 2m42.047s
user 8m48.829s
sys 0m37.758s

On box 2 i7 (6 core):

• single thread make:

real 6m35.815s
user 6m 4.360s
sys 0m31.060s

• 6 threads make:

real 1m17.210s
user 6m32.280s
sys 0m32.200s

• 12 threads make:

real 1m 6.175s
user 9m36.400s
sys 0m44.480s

While the 4 core improves from 9m44s to 2m42 i.e. 3.6 times - expected 0.4 overhead, the 6 core improves from 6m35s to 1m17s i.e. 5.12 times for 6 threads and to 1m6s i.e. 5.98 times for 12 threads. Even if I ran it with 12 threads in reality there are only 6 real cores, just looking like 12 because of hyper-threading, the i7's overhead is very impressive just under 3.33% compared with 10% for Core2 Quad.

But what is more impressive, overall in less than 2 years and a half, the same problem was solved around 2.45 times faster.