GPG with SMP?

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 10/5/11 10:02 AM, Aaron Toponce wrote:
> Does GnuPG support symmetric multiprocessing? If so, my Google-fu is
> failing me, as is reading the available documentation. Reason I ask is
> because encrypting 1TB files is fairly CPU intensive, and it appears that
> it's only using 1 of my 4 cores.

Short version: wouldn't do you any good even if it did.

Long version: CTAK encryption isn't parallelizable: encrypting block N
successfully depends on successfully encrypting block N-1, which in turn
depends on successfully encrypting block N-3, and so on.  There's no way
to partition it into independent subproblems.  A clever hack lets you
parallelize decryption, but even then it's probably not worth it -- the
amount of time spent doing disk I/O will be multiple orders of magnitude
larger than the amount of time decrypting.

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