Re: Fwd: [libreoffice-documentation] Multi-threading in Calc

On Wednesday 22 of April 2020, Olivier Hallot wrote:
> Hi Developers
>
> Can charitable soul involved with threading in Calc spend a couple of
> minutes to write an outline of what we should look to write a section on
> the topic in our guide and Help? Just the outline and some pointers for
> our investigation.
>
> We think this feature is a plus, but it is not clear if and how an end
> user will benefit.

 The "Enable multi-threaded calculation" checkbox is one of those settings 
that aren't actually a preference, in an ideal world they should always be 
enabled, and in fact shouldn't even exist as the thing should Just Work(TM). 
We have others like that, 'Allow use of OpenCL', 'Use OpenGL/Skia for all 
rendering', etc. So AFAICT the purpose of those settings is to admit that we 
don't live in an ideal world and the setting allows people to disable the 
feature in case it turns out it's buggy (which incidentally is relatively 
more likely for all the settings I mentioned).

 So the way I see it the best thing the docs can say about it is something 
along the lines of "this does roughly that, don't touch it unless you know 
you want to touch it".

...
> One of the issues we chose to ignore in the 6.2 Calc Guide was
> multi-threading. The 6.2 Calc Guide contains the following mention of it,
> when describing the Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > Calculate page:
>
> CPU threading settings section
> Enable multi-threaded calculation controls the use of multi-threading /
> parallelism, which can be used to speed up LibreOffice Calc calculations on
> computers with multiple processing cores.

-- 
 Luboš Luňák
 l.lunak@collabora.com