Re: Tasks unleashed

[tmoran@acm.org]

> >   Have you considered a protected Buffer of work to do and a fixed pool of
> > tasks which queue on an entry waiting for the Buffer to have some work to
> > ...
> That's exactly what I'm doing :) but sometimes the "fixed" compromise
> bugs me. ITOH, normally is better to have a upper bound for things, I
> think.

  You could make a hybrid.  An array of (initially null) pointers to
tasks, and, if Buffers can't service a client in a reasonable length of
time, you start up a "new" task.  Then your fixed limit is buffer'length +
task_array'length, but if the program actually only needs a few tasks, or
is sufficiently patient, you will only start up a small number of tasks.
Of course if your program desperately needs a large number of tasks early
in execution, but not later, you'll have to depend on virtual memory to
move those, now superfluous, tasks out of RAM.  If the program really has
phases like that, perhaps it should be split into two programs to be run
sequentially.