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Concurrency models (was: Timer)

Alan Kennedy alanmk at hotmail.com
Tue Oct 28 15:38:54 EST 2003 
[Alan Kennedy]
>> I think threads are really a useful abstraction for programmers who
>> are learning to deal with developing servers for the first time. And
>> threads fulfill their function very well, to a point.
>>
>> But they have fundamental scalability problems: The C10K problem
>> illustrates this well: Surely it should be possible for a modern
>> computer, with giga-everything (!), to serve 10,000 clients
>> simultaneously?

[Ian Bicking]
> Fundamental scalability problems hit very few people.  And in fact
> there's nothing fundamental about them -- the particular of the
> interpreter and your concurrency model are only a very small part of
> the performance of a complex application.  Using threads or async and
> heavy caching, maybe you could outperform by two a multi-process model,
> making non-SMP scalability unimportant.  Or using multiple processes,
> you might be able to more simply migrate applications to other
> computers.  Real programs have a wide variety of constraints.

In general I agree.

However, with the advent of XML webservices, I have an intuition that
processing all that XML and mapping it to local functionality (using
reflection/introspection/etc) will place a much larger burden on CPU
than we generally find today. Throw in XSLT, XQuery, WebDAV et al, and
the CPU requirement could potentially become a limiting factor in
server throughput. 

But, I could be completely wrong, of course :-)

While reading about the C10K problem, I came across a great academic
paper about architecting high-performance network servers using a
combination of event-driven and threaded architectures, with a
specially defined IPC mechanism to tie it all together. It involved
the nice concept of "back pressure" (my words), whereby when a
component became saturated it could notify the event-scheduler, and
cut-off the sources of requests.

I'd love to find that paper again.

-- 
alan kennedy
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