Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> writes: > Hey Neil, > > On Thu 12 Mar 2009 01:53, Neil Jerram <n...@ossau.uklinux.net> writes: > >> Thanks to a hint from helgrind, I think the problem might be that the >> symbols obarray is not thread-safe. But surely using a mutex for >> every symbol that Guile reads would be terrible for performance... > > Dunno, in GStreamer we found that uncontended locks are cheap cheap > cheap. AFAIU they don't even cause context switches. And the reader will > be less important in terms of e.g. startup time once the VM lands.
Hi Linas, Andy, Many thanks for your input on this. I'll go ahead with a mutex or rwlock. First thing is to see if it fixes the problem; if it does, I'll try to measure the performance impact. Neil PS. And thanks Clinton too - although I'd prefer not to have to do such a big rewrite if we can manage without it.