Nor is it something which I would intend to do. I don't know how long it has been since I have used a parallel port to talk to a printer. :-)
O.K. Someone would have to do the experiment, I guess.
Good.
O.K.
It depends on how many registers need to be preserved and re-loaded. The SPARC cpu has a lot more registers than the X86 family of processors -- but it also has multiple sets of registers, so a process switch *can* be fast -- until you get more active processes than you have sets of registers -- then you still need to save everything from a set so it can be reloaded for another process.
A graph of load average vs increasing number of processes is a very shallow graph up to a certain point (which varies with which model of SPARC is involved, as the number of register sets has been increasing through the years) but at a certain number of processes the curve becomes suddenly much steeper.
Enjoy, DoN.