On 02 December 2005 13:32, Joel Reymont wrote:
> I was going on this quote by Simon PJ:
>
> --
> It should be find to have lots of threads, esp if most of them are
> asleep. The only thing to watch out for is that GHC's runtime system
> will consume one *OS* thread for each *blocked* foreign call. So if
> you have 10k threads each making a separate call to the OS to read
> from 10k sockets, and they all block, you'll use 10k OS threads, and
> that will probably fail.
> --
>
> Is this correct and if so how does it mesh with what you said above?
It's correct, but not the whole story. When you do a blocking I/O
operation, it is not implemented in terms of a blocking foreign call, so
it doesn't create an OS thread(*). In -threaded mode, blocking I/O is
implemented by sending a reguest to the I/O manager thread, which
returns a response when I/O is available. In non-threaded mode,
blocking I/O is implemented by returning to the runtime, which
occasionally checks for available I/O and wakes up the appropraite
threads.
Either way, as I said, the programmer doesn't see any difference.
(*) except on Windows, where everything is done differently and blocking
I/O currently gets a real OS thread.
Cheers,
Simon
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