Re: ithreads and sockets

Liz:

Thank you for your quick response to my questions.

<snip>

> I'm afraid these prerequisites will disqualify using Perl ithreads 
> for your application in a production setting.  This is caused by the 
> fact that each Perl ithread gets a _copy_ of all data-structures in 
> each thread.  In practice, this means that even with a small number 
> of modules loaded, the memory footprint soon becomes very large. 

<<< Oh well.  I suppose if the ithreads overhead were lighter this
approach would make sense.  I can't overburden my machine with too many
resource constraints as you suggest would likely exist.

<snip>

> If you're going to need thousands of threads, you're going to need a 
> lot of RAM.  And the copying of data becomes a considerable CPU 
> burden as well.  But I don't need a lot of data, you say.  Well, you 
> do need modules, and modules contain subroutines and variables.  And 
> those are all data.  

<<< It isn't clear to me that I would ever need more than three threads
(one for each socket), but even those are seemingly expensive.

<snip>
> 
> If you still want to use Perl ithreads, and are not worried about 
> performance per se, you might want to have a look at the forks.pm 
> module I wrote.  It basically has the same interface as Perl 
> ithreads, but uses fork() to start threads (hence its name).  It also 
> uses a TCP connection for each thread that has shared variables, so 
> that may turn into a lot of sockets in your case.

<<< At this point I don't think the ithreads approach is a logical path
for my needs.  Perhaps I'll take another look at it when Perl v6 is
released.  I can probably get away with running small parallel processes
for external communications and sharing the data via pipes, shared
memory, etc.

<snip>

> I'm afraid there isn't too much chatting going on here lately.  But 
> the list does get monitored by some people.  ;-)
> 
> In any case, I hope this helps.

<<< Yes, it was quite helpful and will likely save me a great deal of
time and headaches.

My sincerest thanks for your time and wisdom.

Steve