On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 10:05:20PM -0400, Scott Gifford wrote: > "Douglas A. Tutty" <dtu...@vianet.ca> writes: > > On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 08:17:44PM -0400, Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:
> > While you may think its terribly inefficient, it isn't really. A fancy > > "wait" function is just polling anyway, you're just making it overt. > > Just to clarify, wait(2) and the shell wait builtin do not poll, they > instruct the kernel to put the process to sleep until a child process > finishes, then wake it up and return from the wait call. Because of > that they are very efficient. Still, if the programs in question are > doing a great deal of work, the extra work required by polling will > not be very significant in comparison. Isn't that just passing the polling on to the kernel? At some level, some process has to see if a pid exists, if not, wait a period, then check again. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
