Dieter Maurer wrote:
Jim Fulton wrote at 2006-10-6 16:18 -0400:
Dieter Maurer wrote:
...
...
We abused Zope a bit and have build a desktop application with it.
One of the main critiques of our customers is too high memory
consumption. Many have computers with 256 MB memory and
they do not like at all that our application uses roughly a third
of it...
They would even less like it when there were several processes
with each of them taking about 60 MB (many of our caches
are on module level and are shared indeed).
OK, so, for a desktop application responsiveness is a big
issue. There the benefit of multiple threads is that you can
keep the UI responsive while you do background processing
in other threads. The benefit is responsiveness.
I am comparing multiple threads with the multiple processes szenario
you have proposed. Then threads do not give more responsiveness.
And I was comparing multiple threads with a single thread. :)
I would only use multiple processes if I also had multiple
processors. In that case, I'd probably have a decent amount
of memory, which is not your use case.
So, in an application like this where there *is* a benefit
to having multiple threads *and* you have a lot of read-only
data, then I agree that there would be a benefit to sharing
the data. Of course, then you have to deal with thread-safety
issues that you don't normally have in a ZODB application.
Thread-safety is not an issue for read-only data.
Yes it is. An object that is read-only from a persistence
point of view isn't read-only at the Python level. Objects
often have other data. Take volatile data as an example.
Or consider object activation and deactivation. If a ghost is
shared among multiple threads, then __setstate__ could
be called from separate threads.
And of course, there's the possibility that buggy software
might try to mutate the objects. How would you prevent it?
You couldn't wait until commit if there was the possibility that
other threads might see the errant changes.
Jim
--
Jim Fulton mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Powered!
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Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org
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