It's always hard to keep up with all this newfangled technology like kernel threads (independently dispatchable threads of execution within a given task). Fortunately, MPE/iX users that are running on a release 5.0 or later can make use of this facility (using the POSIX.4a pthreads() interfaces). It is a relative newcomer to the platform, having been introduced in 1993 - only 15 scant years ago.

The design center of the HP 3000 has always been online transaction processing. In this environment process creates are relatively rare, and I/O performance is critical. And thus has MPE always been tuned. Heavy process creations, file opens & closes, all to pay the overhead upfront to enable fast I/O. On like hardware, MPE will do poorly compared to HP-UX on high process/thread creation workloads, and will generally outperform HP-UX on I/O intensive workloads, and will significantly outperform HP-UX in database workloads (of course, the apples-to-apples comparisons break down somewhat comparing MPE/iX and Image to HP-UX and Oracle).

...
> I agree with everything you said, performance, complexity,
> and threads just do not exist in MPE.
>
> MPE does have more overhead in the process creation area, and
> the complexity is relative to what you know best.
> MPE additional overhead is also found in the file system,
> system I/O, and security matrices related to users, accounts,
> groups, job/sessions, and processes. ...

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