Re: Languages

From: George Greer (greerga@circlemud.org)
Date: 03/05/99


On Sun, 6 Mar 1999, Andrew Ritchie wrote:

>>I was trying to figure out once - is there a minimum number of threads
>>mandated in the standard?  i.e. that all implementations must support
>>at least 128 threads or something?  I keep wondering if
>>one-thread-per-player, which has some very nice benefits, is worth the
>>performance cost.  (The other end of the spectrum being a Squid-like
>>design of a single thread that never, ever blocks for any reason --
>>even asynch I/O)
>
>For a one-thread-per-player-system, wouldn't you have to make sure that
>global variables aren't being accessed at the same time by two or more
>different threads? That's what I was told, anyhow. So you'd need a flagging
>variable on each global variable (or even on playing structures, seeing as
>they can be accessed by different threads) ... kind of like a INUSE/FREE
>thing. This would be mighty troublesome, wouldn't you agree?

It's a trade-off.  You can hide that extra locking so that it's basically a
non-issue for most code.  The benefit of the thread-per-player is the other
simplifications you can do.  Blocking reads for instance.

--
George Greer            | CircleMUD Snippets
greerga@circlemud.org   | http://mouse.van.m-l.org/snippets/


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