Implicit in all this is the idea that if you do not get the scheduler behaving optimally that it will make a difference sufficient that we can call it a "failur

Implicit in all this is the idea that if you do not get the scheduler behaving optimally that it will make a difference sufficient that we can call it a "failure". That's what I'm questioning. Precisely because the dimensions of the problem space have increased, and the raw performance of everything except register save/restore and TLB invalidation has increased, there's wide latitude for scheduling algorithms that are "not quite right".