On 10/12/07, Robert L. Read <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think we should be a little cautious about adding a new dependency. > For example, the dependency on FiveAM for testing forces a lot of things > to be pulled in.
But it makes testing better and easier, I filed a feature enhancement request in trac, which was approved by Ian as I remember it, a long time before implementing the switch to FiveAM. > So my big questions about this would be: > > 1) Is the new feature configurable? That is, if I don't want to set up > any cron jobs, will everything still work out-of-the-box, even if I > might not get the benefit of this caching? Yes it is configurable, disabled by default. > 2) Do we have tests for it? No new ones in elephant. I know Alex has tested it a lot, and have been testing multi processes scenarios using the grand-prix test. > 3) Is it possible to do it in some way that does not create an > extra-lisp dependence? For example, I use timer threads inside lisp in > my own application, which are free with SBCL but are probably platform > dependent...nonetheless, it is far better to have a pure-lisp solution > than to have to move outside lisp where you have an operating-system > dependent issue. Well it depends on what goals you have. The goals for the postmodern backend are speed and safety and to a less degree simplicity. The cache is optional, and I am sure that even in windows you can implement something that executes a bat file at regular intervals, I think it was called the AT command?. Maybe there is a Lisp solution to this as well, but if it requires threads, I think it should be optional. > > I don't want to sound ungrateful...it is very nice to have people like > yourself magically create new features that we can all potentially use. > But I would also like to know: what is the benefit of this feature? If > it provides better performance, can we characterize the improvement? It gives better performance. I don't have an exact number, for our application it was a lot better. i think Alex has some numbers. If someone comes up with a good idea to make it even faster, please tell us and we might implement it. /Henrik Hjelte > > > On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 17:00 +0200, Henrik Hjelte wrote: > > Hello, > > I have some new features for the postmodern backend, made by Alex > > Mizrahi. The most interesting thing is a cache that is safe to use > > between processes. It takes some steps to set up, for example you > > should make a cron job that cleans a table that is used to communicate > > updates between processes. It is best described by comments in the > > source code. We are beta testing it at our site http://stix.to, and it > > seems to work fine but note that it is new code so it should be > > regarded as unstable. > > > > You can get the patches from this darcs repo: > > http://common-lisp.net/project/grand-prix/darcs/elephant > > > > /Henrik Hjelte > > _______________________________________________ > > elephant-devel site list > > elephant-devel@common-lisp.net > > http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel > > _______________________________________________ > elephant-devel site list > elephant-devel@common-lisp.net > http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel > > > _______________________________________________ elephant-devel site list elephant-devel@common-lisp.net http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
