On Apr 11, 2012, at 9:40 AM, Jeremy Rudd wrote:
> On 4/10/2012 6:09 PM, Jorge wrote:
>> That's exactly what threads_a_gogo is for:
>> 
>> <https://github.com/xk/node-threads-a-gogo>
>> 
>> It lets you run these calculations in parallel, in javascript, in threads, 
>> and using all the available CPU cores. Then the main thread will receive the 
>> results in a callback or via an event.
> 

> Hi all,

Hi Jeremy,

> threads_a_gogo sounds cool, but what are the technical details of using it?
> 
> 1. What does it use in the back-end to schedule / manage tasks? child_process?

It creates p-threads and runs v8 isolates in them.

> 2. child_process takes some 30 ms to spawn a child thread. How much time does 
> GoGo take?

When I run this:

$ time node -e "require('threads_a_gogo').createPool(100).destroy()"

I get:

real    0m0.387s
user    0m0.390s
sys     0m0.286s

That's 3.87 ms per thread

But note that these 0.387s include as well the time to start node, the time to 
require('threads_a_gogo'), and the time to destroy the 100 threads, so it must 
be a bit less than 3.87 ms per thread.

> 3. How does it internally work? Are there constantly running threads + 
> scheduler? Or does it spawn a new thread per task?

You could create/destroy the threads on demand, but I would rather create a 
thread pool of twice or 3x the number of cores and install in them only once 
the functions that do the calculations, then reuse them again and again via a 
pool.any.eval(program, cb). Each thread takes only ~2MB, and when idle it uses 
exactly 0% cpu.

> 4. Is it recommended for 1-10 ms tasks as well? Do you have any idea / stats 
> to show performance with / without GoGo?

Threads_a_gogo lets you 

-run these blocking calls in parallel so
-they won't block node's main thread
-you'll be exploiting all the cpu cores in the machine

With an n cores machine, you'll be serving results n times faster, but even in 
a single core machine, you should use threads_a_gogo simply to avoid blocking 
node.

WRT to performance, a fibonacci(40) in a thread_a_gogo runs about twice as fast 
as in node's main thread, see: <https://gist.github.com/2018811> it's also a 
good example because it's very similar to your use case, istm.

> Thanks,
> Jeremy Rudd

Cheers,
-- 
Jorge.

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