[pron]

I honestly don't know :) I was simply reporting my results experimenting with this (I'll try to write a blog post about it some time in the near future), so I'll defer to those with a deeper knowledge of the Linux kernel.

I have read that the Linux scheduler exploits some heuristics if it can guess how soon a blocked thread will need to be woken up, so this might have something to do with that.

[reginaldjcooper]

I was worried it might be an empirical result :) thanks for responding, though, and I'd love to see the post when it's finished