Re: Issues and doubts about ithreads

At 12:18 PM -0300 1/21/05, Martín Ferrari wrote:
>Also, I found today the Elizabeth Mattijsen's forks.pm module, and
>read that it uses TCP communication (why not UNIX, or -again- mmap?).

Patches are welcome.  ;-)

Also: I''ve recently become to appreciate 
memcached, and was wondering whether that would 
be a good alternative for setting and fetching 
shared values.

Unfortunately I don't have the tuits until at least the beginning of March.


>I read a little of the code but couldn't understand anything :).

Is there anything in particular that you don't understand more than the rest?


>I'm very worried about performance issues, and some hints would be useful
>before deciding what to use for the project.

Using TCP/IP will add latency and some CPU 
overhead to your inter-thread communication.  How 
this offsets with using a lot less memory, is 
really dependent on your situation.  Basically I 
would say, don't expect forks.pm to be faster 
than threads once threads have started.  On the 
other hand, for any serious program (with any 
serious number of modules loaded), there's a good 
chance that forks.pm will be faster in starting a 
thread.


>Having spent many hours trying to figure out what to do, there is very
>little stopping me from trying a complete C solution, but that would
>be painful! Please, give me some hints so I can still be a lazy perl
>lover :)

If speed is what you ultimately want, then C would be the way.

If you don't need any inter-thread locking (which 
may happen in some applications), then maybe a 
fork / memcached combo would be a solution if you 
have a large amount of shared data.  See 
Cache::Memcached on CPAN.


Hope this helps.


Liz