Is a mass/reduce script faster than a scheduled script even if we only have 2 processors?

if you make both processors run in parallel in an MR then yes

Which I can do on the M/R deployment, correct?

how you handle map and reduce determines how many processors/threads will be used if i'm not mistaken. concurrency would affect this if there were multiple instances of the script running at the same time.

correct you can do it on the deployment. note you need to manage the processors and the schedules to make sure they are not busy and scripts end up waiting for a long time

I'd argue that measuring would be the best way to tell which is faster.

@stalbert fair enough - The situation is, the scheduled script is already written and runs properly. I didn't want to write a M/R script if there wasn't going to be a time savings. But I guess ultimately, I just need to do it

empirical evidence is best in a situation like this. I don't know how complex it is but hopefully not too big a deal to convert the scheduled to a MR script?