Gregory Woodhouse wrote: >it is all too easy >to write a process that spends a significant amount of its time >actually polling globals for a "stop flag" or something similar. If >this is done thoughtlessly, it can bring a system to its knees, and any >practical implementation is going to have to throttle this process back >enough so that it consumes only a small percentage of processing time >(and, potentially, direct I/O).
This is a non-issue in MUMPS implementations that I have worked with in recent years, even a HANG of only one second in such a loop is sufficient to prevent it from consuming significant processing time while idle. This seems to me like a perfectly acceptable way of handling background tasks that do things like printing reports or periodically scanning the database for inconsistencies or medical alert conditions or gathering errors and special events from the logs, not system to system communications. >Now, asynchronous delivery of signals (a perfect job for SSVNs, IMO) is >a much more efficient (and typical) way of solving the same problem. >Certainly, if I were to code a solution to this problem in C, I would >not rely on a mechanism so primitive as a polling loop. ><soapbox>This is yet another reason I continue to argue that the >language standard needs to be updated.</soapbox> --------------------------------------- Jim Self Systems Architect, Lead Developer VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself) ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
