Re: dynamic multithreading

[Thierry Lelegard <thierry.lelegard@canal-plus.fr>]

Bj�rn Lundin wrote:
> If I remember correctly, there's an example of
> a process action as server, listening for new connections.
> For each new connection, a new task is created

This is generally a bad design.

- First, there is performance issue. Creating a new task each time
  a new connection comes in is a pain on heavily loaded servers.

- Second, you must absolutely unchecked_deallocate each task after
  it is terminated (not always trivial to synchronize on actual
  termination of a task). Otherwise, you have a memory leak.

As an alternative, never let a service task die. Once a task has
finished servicing a connection, make it wait and reuse it for a
later connection. You may create a finite number of service tasks
at startup or create new tasks only when no service task is idle
and a new connection arrives.

This is not so difficult to design and much more robust.
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Thierry Lelegard
CANAL+ Technologies, 34 place Raoul Dautry, 75906 Paris Cedex 15, France
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