threading

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 11:49 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>> Roy Smith <roy at panix.com>:
>>> IOW, the processes are there to exercise the CPUs and should not
>>> represent individual connections or other dynamic entities.
>>
>> That's potentially brutal on a shared system! I hope it's controlled
>> by an option, or that you do this only in something you're writing for
>> yourself alone.
>
> I'm thinking of a dedicated system here and exploiting the available CPU
> resources as efficiently as possible.

Huh. I don't remember the last time I worked on any system that could
be dedicated to one single job. My servers are all carrying multiple
services (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, DNS, database, maybe a MUD or two...), my
desktop computer doubles as a router and a VM host and a server for a
few internal things (the NIV 1984 translation of the Bible is hosted
there, for convenience, as is my RSS reader), etc, etc, etc. Ages
since I've had enough physical hardware that I can afford to say
"You're *just* the XYZ server and nothing else". At very least, I'll
usually want to have some spare CPU cycles so I can plop a backup
service on there (eg a PostgreSQL replicating clone, or a fail-over
HTTP server, or a secondary DNS), but mainly, I've been working for
the past however-many years under budget constraints. Oh the luxury of
a dedicated application server.

But that's why I said "writing for yourself alone", or govern it with
an option. For any sort of general server software, it should be able
to cope with a shared system. (And that should probably be the default
- anyone who's running a dedicated system will normally already be
aware that most programs need to be tweaked before you get maximum
throughput out of them.)

ChrisA