On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Tomaz Muraus <to...@cloudkick.com> wrote: > > Currently, if you want to launch multiple number of nodes or, for example, > you are constantly polling for node status on multiple accounts, you need to > wait for a previous call to return or use something like threading which is > in most cases less than ideal.
I don't think the majority of libcloud users are using libcloud in a manner that requires such gymnastics. I also don't think threading is easily dismissable as "less than ideal". I mean yes, we can do the GIL dance and talk about the pitfalls of concurrency; that is not an argument with a shortcoming of evidence for both sides. However, given Python's natives for things like a multiprocessing pool, threadsafe Queue, and the other rich APIs in that department I don't see how libcloud reinventing that wheel is going to benefit the end user. If I'm using a library like libcloud, and I know it's a blocker and I need to execute 100 node creations, I'm always fine with queueing up the requests and firing off worker threads. It's a common pattern and I've done it before. I understand that it's necessary because of the way libcloud is designed. If, on the other hand, I'm writing a highly-available TCP server in Python, I'd hope the libraries I use are designed asynchronously. The difference, I think, is whether an application is reaching out to get something or responding to incoming requests. Asynchronous tends to benefit response models, and I don't think it will help us a lot with reaching out - libcloud users most likely understand HTTP and waiting and are willing to work around it if they need to. Asynchronous, to me, seems like a significant investment in the library for not much benefit. Certainly it will benefit the Cloudkicks of the world, but I think if we roll it out it will be very unused, and we will have significantly refactored the library for little gain. As Jerry mentioned, I'm willing to be proven wrong by the users - please, speak up. -- Jed Smith j...@jedsmith.org
