Re: [Coder-Com] Re: PROBLEM: high system usage / poor SMPnetwork performance

[Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com>]

Kev wrote:
> 
> > > I don't understand what it is you're saying here.  The ircu server uses
> > > non-blocking sockets, and has since long before EfNet and Undernet branched,
> > > so it already handles EWOULDBLOCK or EAGAIN intelligently, as far as I know.
> >
> > Right.  poll() and Solaris /dev/poll are programmer-friendly; they give
> > you the current readiness status for each socket.  ircu handles them fine.
> >
> > /dev/epoll and Linux 2.4's rtsig feature, on the other hand, are
> > programmer-hostile; they don't tell you which sockets are ready.
> > Instead, they tell you when sockets *become* ready;
> > your only indication that those sockets have become *unready*
> > is when you see an EWOULDBLOCK from them.
> 
> If I'm reading Poller_sigio::waitForEvents correctly, the rtsig stuff at
> least tries to return a list of which sockets have become ready, and your
> implementation falls back to some other interface when the signal queue
> overflows.  It also seems to extract what state the socket's in at that
> point.
> 
> If that's true, I confess I can't quite see your point even still.  Once
> the event is generated, ircd should read or write as much as it can, then
> not pay any attention to the socket until readiness is again signaled by
> the generation of an event.  Sorry if I'm being dense here...

If you actually do read or write *until an EWOULDBLOCK*, no problem.
If your code has a path where it fails to do so, it will get stuck,
as no further readiness events will be forthcoming.  That's all.
- Dan